gamemaker ekram novara | capitol

[[GM] EKRAM NOVARA | mattio]

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gamemaker ekram novara
thirty-five

[[GM] EKRAM NOVARA | mattio]

[ ACT I ]
[ A BOY & A TOY ]

First, there is Anais Novara. The brains.

Then, Ivan Novara. The brawn.

Third is Elle Novara. The beauty.

Years later, Ekram Novara appears, pigeonholed into a faraway space. He is an off-the-shelf option in case something goes wrong with the stock on the floor.

"Family is everything." Or so his dad tells Ekram as the butler lays a fresh-pressed child's suit out for a party. "And this dinner's success is essential to the family." Ekram nods, unwrapping the string laced around his fingertips to start putting on the white shirt. Dad always courts business investors on Friday nights, but today's event differs from the usual ones.

Typically, only Mom, Dad, and Ekram's older sisters and brother go out to drink champagne and talk about deals and money. But this businessman has kids. Ages ten and eight, and Ekram falls between them at nine. He's to play entertainer tonight, a card only played when there are other boys and girls around. Ekram loves to entertain, and Dad says it's one of the most important jobs of the night. While the rest of the family balances between the dining room and the drawing room, Ekram gets free rein on the second floor to play.

Dad hopes they'll play Peacekeeper with the toy guns and foam bullets he bought earlier in the week. Peacekeeper and Rebel, as he called it back in the day. Maybe they'll lose an expensive vase or painting in the process, but the Novaras amassed enough wealth in sixty years of business that almost anything could be replaced.

But Ekram takes the boys and girls to his playroom. No guns or kickballs or bullets. In fact, none of those things are allowed inside. In Ekram's domain, it is tame, elegant, and delicate. Two massive dollhouses match the children's height at the far wall. Action figures, toy dolls, and marionette puppets sit at the dinner table, waiting to continue Ekram's story before the butler dragged him away to get dressed. While there are a few newer dolls and action figures (including the limited edition 67th Leon Krigel,) most are old-fashioned and vintage items. Each doll's wardrobe is locked away in the chests on the other side of the room. Whenever he and his nanny go on an afternoon stroll, he insists they stop by the antique store to get a new outfit for one of his toys.

Ekram sits on the floor without another word and picks up two of the dolls. One is a normal barbie doll, adorned with eyes of sapphire and a dress of the same shade. The other is a marionette. Ekram wraps a set of strings around his fingers and raises his arms to force the marionette to stand. With the flick of his ring finger, the marionette man, dressed in a sweater and pleaded slacks, points at the barbie doll. They're talking in his head, but the frown on Ekram's face tells the other kids that they're arguing.

"Can we play too?" The girl asks him. Ekram's hands rest, and the marionette puppet settles back into his chair. He turns back to see both of the kids standing with their hands behind their backs. The girl seems interested in the dolls, but the boy has his eyes on the door, where a toy gun is waiting with his name on it.

"You can. There are lots of dolls." He motions to the second dollhouse where his second-favorites sit out in their garden. The girl sits by it, picking up a couple of the dolls. She shakes one of the marionette puppets, and its strings get caught between each other. "BE CAREFUL!" Ekram yells, dropping his dolls and scooting to the other side to fix the wrapped-up wires.

"If you want to play with these ones, you have to put your fingers through the little loops like this." He demonstrates with his own. The thumb and pinkie control the arms, the index and ring fingers control the legs, and the middle finger is the master of the head and torso. "See?"

They play in silence, with the other boy watching from behind. "What are they talking about?" He asks, and before Ekram can explain, the girl speaks.

"They had a nice date in the garden, but the boy is talking to the girl about how he doesn't think his mom will accept her."

Ekram laughs on the other side.

"And what about yours?"

"Well, he's currently giving his wife instructions on how to dispose of the butler." The air in the room ceases, and Ekram continues. "Her husband walked in on their butler hurting their maid. He had to save her, but he whacked the butler over the head with a vase and he died. So they have to cover it up."

"Oh." The girl sighs, a bit shocked.

"Sick." The boy smiles, and sits beside Ekram. "Who are all these guys?" The boy points to the other dolls sitting at the table.

"Well… those are their kids. One… two… three. They're all scheming to get rid of the body. And then alllllll the way up here," Ekram points to the attic where a smaller marionette sits on a bed. "That's the youngest boy. They told him to go up to his room and be good. They think they're protecting him by not telling, but they're just making him feel bad."

"That's a lot of drama."

"Yeah. I think they forget he's there sometimes. He's lonely and has to make up his fun."

The kids keep playing until it's time for them to go home. It turns out, the neighbors caught the mom carrying the butler's body outside. What'll happen next?

The boy and girl he played with won't be allowed to decide. They're not allowed back to the house.

Dad walks into Ekram's bedroom after lunch the next day to yell at him. The boy and girl loved him, but their parents thought the stories Ekram told them were too weird and almost too personal. They decided not to invest in his dad's new gentleman's club on the other side of the city.

He takes away Ekram's dolls and locks the playroom for a month. A day, his dad told him, for every million dollars you cost me. For his second punishment, Dad signs him up for volleyball, track, and piano lessons for the next school year. Ekram does all of it gladly if it'll make his father proud.

He grows, pretending to have more interest in those hobbies than he does. Dad schedules business dinners on nights of his track meets, volleyball games, and piano recitals. Anything to keep Ekram away. He messes things up, he's irresponsible.

The little puppet boy in the dollhouse finds permanent residency in the attic, stuffed in the toy chest like a lonely spare part until he's old enough to be sent away to build something on his own.

[[GM] EKRAM NOVARA | mattio]

[ ACT II ]
[ CLIP HIS STRINGS & CALL IT WINGS ]

Through his teen years, Ekram stood at arms-length from the business despite doing everything his father asked of him. While he quit volleyball after one year in high school (because of the wear and tear it put on his hands,) he kept up with his piano lessons, liking the classics and old music that plays through black and white movies. As for track and field, Ekram preferred the long-distance races and marathons. They were steady, requiring endurance of the body and mind.

Those interests, and the success he found in them, caught his father's eye. The medals, trophies, and awards he won ended up in the glass cases Ekram once thought he'd never reach. He became a talking point at business dinners and house parties. Mom shoved him to the grand piano at the center of the drawing room to play for all the adults as they cut into the pink champagne cake for dessert. Dad even attended his final high school race, where the best of the best in the Capitol competed. Ekram placed second but saw gold in the achievement of getting his father to pay attention and take some pride in him.

Then again, was it that his siblings had all grown up and expanding their horizons that only left him to have the attention? However this admiration came about, Ekram welcomed it.

With all eyes on his performances and track meets, the time he did have at home was all the more private. His family recognized that he was a reserved boy who needed alone time to re-energize.

Ekram kept his oldest habits locked behind his bedroom door. He set his most prized puppets, marionettes, dolls, and antiques out for display on the shelves across his expansive closet. Unfortunately, he had to give up some of the more juvenile dolls and their houses to his nieces and nephews (another repercussion of Dad's desperation to phase him out of this interest.) He kept most of his more valuable items because they were collector's pieces more than they were toys.

Determined to keep them in good condition, Ekram snuck the puppets and dolls out of the house to get their limbs repaired or stitches for the tears in their clothes. At home, he'd set them out in his room and run through their stories in his head. Wife leaves her old-money husband for a new-money man. Murder mystery in the mansion; who killed the heartthrob pool boy? The old couple kidnaps a young boy and holds him for a ten-million-dollar ransom. Even as a boy, Ekram erred on the side of gruesome and twisted. The acceptance Dad gave him could only stretch so far, and perhaps he offered it too late to rid him of an interest Ekram should have outgrown years ago.

He still lived as the fifth wheel between his mother and father and his three siblings. Strapped to the back of the car, never hitting the ground. Ekram's sister, Anais, told him he should be grateful. The family business is a bunch of financial nonsense and dealing with overly handsy drunk men who act like boys. It's not just that, though. It's the trust, or lack thereof, that keeps him suspended from the family reality. Grandpa picked Dad to be his successor, but all Dad said was that the "most deserving" member of the family would get it when he was too old to carry on the job. Not just from his kids, but from everyone. Azzaro, Galette, Novara, all of them. Even his Great Aunt's son-in-law and his kids were on the table.

-=+=-

It was when Ekram finished his degree in business that his father tested him for the first time. A shot in the dark after years of doing what he wanted. With a sizeable loan and an established business partner, Barry Adames with his signature blue pinstripe suit, Dad let him try his hand. "Do anything you want, Ekram. Barry will be there to help you with the logistics, but the vision is for you to create."

Creativity. It was something Ekram had a leg up on in comparison to his brother and sisters who were brought into the fold right away. Years of storytelling in his mind, filled with characters and soap-opera theatrics. The only missing piece was opening that creativity up to the world for everyone else to enjoy.

With the help and guidance of Barry Adames, a family friend and business partner of the Novara's, Ekram bought out an old theatre and quickly went to work on his vision. Live action variety theatre. Some of the shows consisted of actors performing a variety of stories, improvisation, and audience interaction, but Ekram's pride and joy came from the puppet shows. Human-scaled marionette puppets with voice actors in the wings and a small orchestra to accompany them in the pit below the stage.

He organized it all: the scripts, direction, costuming, and managing the house. Barry simply never told him no and worked behind the scenes to make sure everything was successful. Dad avoided the theatre and all conversations about it for around a year, letting him build a reputation in the business before he made any judgments.

Or so he thought, anyway. When his parents attended their first show at Ekram's venue, he went into overdrive like a director the evening before opening night. He yelled, bossing everyone around to make sure nothing was left up to chance when it came to impressing his father. And Ekram thought the show went well. It was the second showing with their new animatronic marionettes (which saved them quite a bit of wages paying puppeteers on the raptors.

At the end of the show, Ekram peered past the curtains to see the typical standing ovation from the crowd of viewers. His sisters, brother, Mom, they all stood and clapped. But his father remained seated.

Couldn't he just fake it or pretend? At least for a moment?

Ekram kept trying for another year, hoping to reel his father back in with bigger, better, and louder. But nothing seemed to work. Two years into his business, Ekram had a meeting with his father and Barry Adames. After looking at the numbers and the vision, as well as consulting with his business partner, his father told him that his vision was too juvenile and his aesthetics too stuck in the past for him to take seriously. And with that, his father told him that as far as the family business went, Ekram's style and presentation would be incapable of meeting the needs of their patrons. "Men want entertainment that is sexy and fun, not old and creepy."

Crushed, he stood in silence until his father spoke again.

"Keep doing what makes you happy, Ekram. We're rich– you are rich– just sit back and enjoy it. Find a nice partner, sip a margarita at the beach, and live your life."

The conversation proved just how little his father knew about Ekram's ambitions and desires? Just sit back and enjoy life? Fuck no.

For years, Ekram worked on building his theatre's reputation, but in the wings, he hustled for more greatness. If he couldn't head the family's business, he would just have to do something greater. Restore the family name in ways that the future Head of House could only dream of.

They'll see. Soon, they'll all see.

[[GM] EKRAM NOVARA | mattio]

[ ACT III ]
[ THE 97TH HUNGER GAMES ]

To be written.

[earthling]

[[earthling]]

It's finally his turn in the spotlight!!!

ACCEPTED!