"Director Vance!"
Asher Reed spotted Leo from across the lounge and waved with the full-arm enthusiasm of someone who had long since stopped worrying about looking dignified at industry events. The grin on his face was bright and entirely mischievous.
The Final Fight had brought him here tonight, an indie drama whose director had tracked Asher down specifically after watching The Outcast, convinced that the actor who could play a shameless scoundrel with that particular blend of vulnerability and defiance was exactly what his film needed. He hadn't been wrong.
"Don't just stand there, come meet them!" Asher waved Leo forward with the proprietary confidence of a man introducing his best work.
Leo crossed the lounge.
Behind Asher stood two young women. The first, Maisie Carroll, was seventeen, still finishing her senior year of high school, attending tonight in a playful white cocktail dress, hair in a chic bun, radiating the specific energy of someone on the verge of becoming something the industry hadn't quite named yet. The second, Zoey F., carried herself with a quieter, more self-contained elegance, the kind of screen presence that registered before the camera had fully focused.
"Maisie, are you alright?" Zoey looked at her friend. Maisie's face had gone a deep, involuntary crimson the moment Leo stepped into arm's reach.
Zoey, usually the more reserved of the two, did a quick mental calculation. On their last three sets together, Maisie had been unable to stop talking about Leo Vance. She had dragged Zoey and Asher to see Hidden Inventory four times in its opening week. She had, at one point, confirmed spending fifteen hundred dollars on a life-sized custom figure of Gojo Satoru for her bedroom, and had done so without apparent shame.
The picture was becoming clear.
Leo greeted them with the loose, unhurried warmth that was his default register. "Good to meet you both."
"Leo- hello." Maisie's eyes found the floor, then his face, then the floor again in rapid rotation.
She gave herself a silent internal speech. New era woman. Composure. You can do this.
"I'm, actually your biggest fan. I've loved you since the first season of JJK. I mean, I loved Gojo-sensei. I mean- I love both of you. I mean--" The words arrived in the wrong order and kept arriving.
Leo's expression curved into something gently mischievous. "So you love Gojo-sensei, but not me?"
Maisie turned a shade that Asher would later describe as "sunset over a power plant."
Leo let her off the hook with a laugh. "Relax. This is my first Meridian ceremony too. Look at me, I feel like I'm hanging out at home."
His posture confirmed it. He genuinely looked more comfortable in the front row of the industry's most prestigious awards night than most people looked in their own living rooms. Maisie and Zoey both laughed despite themselves, the tension breaking cleanly.
"Leo, could I get your contact...?" Maisie asked, her voice landing somewhere between hopeful and preemptively apologetic.
"Of course." Leo pulled out his phone without hesitation. "I've been looking at a few scripts for the Celestial Universe that could use fresh faces. You two might be exactly what I'm thinking of."
He said it like a simple observation. Asher, standing slightly to the side, caught the implication and quietly filed it as the most low-key career-changing sentence he had ever witnessed.
As the evening filled out, the lounge settled into the unhurried rhythm of an industry gathering at full capacity — veterans comparing projects, first-timers calibrating their composure, everyone quietly aware that every conversation in this room could be the beginning of something.
Chloe Summers arrived.
The shift in the room's attention was immediate and unannounced. Not the performative attention of celebrity-spotting, but something more genuine, the specific regard that a room full of professionals reserves for someone who has genuinely moved them.
Leo had personally extended a guest invitation when the Meridian notification arrived. Chloe had accepted immediately, with the deliberateness of someone who had learned, at cost, not to let good opportunities wait.
Director James Crawford, a legendary figure who had been directing films for forty years and who spoke to newcomers approximately never crossed the lounge to greet her. He expressed, without preamble, that he had a drama in development that he believed she should lead. He spoke to her the way he would speak to a peer.
Gerald Holt, one of the industry's genuine living monuments, drifted over to share a joke that made her laugh without reservation. Arthur Sterling, whose name was synonymous with a particular era of Hollywood, stopped by simply to tell her that her work had affected him.
Leo watched from a few feet away. In less than a single season, Chloe had gone from an unknown with a terminal diagnosis and an S-rank system score to the person this room wanted to know. It was quietly extraordinary.
He had a sense that she was only getting started.
On the far side of the lounge, Leo noticed two more promising faces, Jackson Y. and Maia Q., both hovering at the edge of the room's more established clusters with the patient alertness of people waiting for their moment. He noted them and moved on.
Then, in the corner furthest from the room's main current of conversation, a figure sat alone.
Medium build. Unremarkable suit. Picking at his fingernails with the particular focused boredom of a man who has been overlooked enough times that he has stopped being surprised by it. Nobody had come to speak to him. Nobody appeared to be moving in that direction.
Leo changed course.
"Sir Arthur?"
Arthur Sloane looked up.
The expression that crossed his face in that first half-second was the specific confusion of someone unaccustomed to being recognized — not surprised exactly, but genuinely uncertain how to recalibrate.
He stood quickly. "Director Vance. Hello. It's a pleasure."
Leo extended his hand and returned the slight bow that Arthur instinctively offered, a deliberate gesture, one professional acknowledging another's craft directly. "I've heard a great deal about your work. I just wanted to say hello. We should exchange contacts, I have a feeling we'll find a reason to work together. There's a certain kind of role I've been thinking about. A Kingpin type. Someone who owns every room he walks into from the inside out."
Arthur Sloane went very still.
He was a man who had spent decades doing good work in small rooms that emptied before the credits finished rolling. He had taught acting workshops in Studio City for rates that wouldn't cover a decent dinner, not because he lacked ability but because the industry's machinery had simply never pointed in his direction. He knew exactly what it meant when Leo Vance decided to look at you.
"You, you actually know my work?" His voice was level, but only barely.
"That indie thriller you did last year. You were the only reason I finished it." Leo said it plainly, without embellishment.
Arthur Sloane's eyes, to his own visible mortification, went slightly wet at the corners.
Leo put a hand briefly on his shoulder. "The bigger the waves, the more valuable the fish, Arthur. I think you're finally ready to rise."
Around them, the lounge's various A-listers observed this exchange with the polite bewilderment of people watching something they couldn't quite categorize. The most sought-after director on the planet, standing in the corner, being earnest with a character actor nobody outside of three film festivals had heard of.
They didn't understand it. They filed it away anyway.
The house lights dimmed.
A quiet settled over the lounge, and the crowd began moving toward the main hall with the unhurried consensus of people who know the evening has officially begun.
Leo settled into his seat in the front row.
The stage opened with the evening's first presenters stepping into the light - Harrison Reed and Maya West, golden-era icons, the legendary leads of Empire of Fate reunited on the same stage for the first time in years. The nostalgic wave that moved through the audience was audible.
Leo watched them cross to the microphone.
The job fair was over.
The 94th Meridian Awards had officially begun.
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.
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