Shakespeare one shots

The prestige

Hey faeries! These, evidently, are not Shakespeare characters. Before you exit this book whilst scoffing at my self-entitlement asking yourself why I thought you'd stay and read, hold up.

These characters are from a different book. It is a very good book. I'll happily direct you to it if you're interested. Later note: nvm.

This particular scenario is one inspired by and based on the movie The Prestige, which I watched and fell in love with. It will not, in all probability, appear in the story these characters reside in.

It's more fun if you question it.

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There is a single spotlight illuminating a space on a stage. The audience is silent as the dead. (The dead that stay dead, at least.)

There is a girl standing in the spotlight. She is dressed in a long, wine-red coat over a simple black blouse, thin white gloves, and a black top hat. Her blonde hair hangs loose on her shoulder.

She walks stage left, her spotlight following her obediently, revealing an array of objects.

There is a stool. On the stool is a cage. Next to the cage is a cloth.

The girl holds up her hand. She flicks it once, twice, and on the third time curls it under her wrist. It comes back up holding a dove.

The audience gives light applause.

The girl places the dove in the cage gently, slowly, almost as if she doesn't want to, but she bites her lip and continues. She spreads the cloth over the cage deftly.

She pinches the cloth at the top, where the point of the cage is poking into the fabric, creating a tiny pyramid.

A blink of an eye and you'd miss it.

The cloth drifts down onto the stool. The large impression of the cage is gone. The audience is fascinated, but remains in suspense. Silent.

The cheers only erupt when the girl pulls the dove out of her coat. She smiles a pained smile and pets it gently, slowly. An apology.

"Albright?"

tђє รקєll เร ๒г๏кєภ.

The girl opens her eyes. She is standing on the stage of an empty high school auditorium. She looks around, irked, but softens when she matches the identity to the voice that so rudely snapped her back to reality.

"Hello, Alexander," she sighs.

Alexander is a boy her age with short black hair that only looked neat under a thousand stage lights. He was tall, fairly thin, with lanky arms good for making sweeping, dramatic gestures.

He grins.

"You were onstage again," he smirks, but his eyes are narrowed and his head is low, like he's telling a secret. Or approaching someone criminally insane. You choose.

"Yes, I was," Albright admits proudly. She gives him her most glittery smile.

"Well," Alexander responds, putting his hands in his pockets and coming a few steps closer. "Would it be a terrible inconvenience to bring me up there with you?"

Albright's smile shifts from glittery to sly. She is the puppeteer. She is the storyteller. She calls the shots from here on out.

She puts her hands on Alexander's shoulders and stares him straight in the eye.

"Close your eyes," she whispers. He does.

tђє รקєll ђคร гєtยгภє๔, คภ๔ tђє ﻮค๓є ђคร ๒єﻮยภ.

There is a single spotlight illuminating a space on a stage. There is no audience in the seats.

There are two people standing in the spotlight, a girl and a boy. Both are dressed to the nines in black, white, and red showman's attire.

The girl steps upstage. The spotlight and the boy's eyes follow her obediently.

"There are three steps found in every basic disappearing act," she states.

She holds up a small rubber ball.

"The first part..."

She bounces the ball on the floor and catches it as it comes back up.

"The second part..." 

She throws the ball into the air, and it returns to her hand. She twists her hand under her wrist and pulls it back up. The ball is gone.

"And the third."

She reaches up behind the boy's ear, pulling it back clutching the ball. She hands it to him.

He gazes at it, mixing fascination, wonder, and suspicion in his eyes like watercolor.

The girl grins. This means he hasn't figured it out.

"Let me explain."

She walks to center stage and plants her feet, facing the audience, and, subsequently, the boy downstage.

"The first part is called the pledge. The magician shows you something..." she gestures to herself. "Ordinary."

(The boy laughs in his head. Albright could not be described as ordinary.)

"The second part is called the turn," she continues. "The magician takes the ordinary and turns it into something extraordinary."

She claps twice. The spotlight goes out for a moment, a second, the blink of an eye. When it returns, the girl is nowhere to be seen.

Her voice echoes around the theater like that of a ghost, and the boy knows he won't find its source no matter how hard he looks, but he swivels his head anyway.

"But you wouldn't clap yet. Making something disappear isn't enough. You have to bring it back," the voice says. "Now you're looking for the secret. But you don't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled."

The boy hears the switch of a spotlight.

He whips around to see her, standing behind the rows of seats, both arms open wide to take in imaginary applause.

"The third part is called the prestige!"

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Know, faeries, that there is a perfectly plausible method behind how Albright achieved her stunt. It just takes a bit of a literary epiphany to comprehend.

May your bag of tricks always remain filled to the brim.