“Alright all you families at home—we have now finally reached the deepest stretches of the Amazon rainforest, filled with venomous snakes and the equally venomous words of my co-hosts. Heh, um, and although we haven’t seen any tribal… Is this on?” David looked away from the camera, turning to the man standing behind it. Leath gave a thumbs-up. “Right, okay… From the top, alright?”
Stepping back from the camera again, David deftly avoided a hanging vine. He shook his limbs a little, took a breath, and redid the scene. By theatrically moving his hands, mockingly avoiding the dangerous ‘wildlife’ around them, he was successfully able to make it seem as though they were actually in an even slightly dangerous situation. “I’m sure you all remember the reason we came here to begin with.”
From behind the camera, Leath said, “To see half-naked tribal broads?”
David paused. “Yes, obviously, but we came for something else, too. Didn’t we?” Since Leath didn’t answer, David answered his own question. “According to a bunch of very credible rumours that I trust fully, something veeery special is going to happen this year—something that hasn’t happened in, um, a thousand years, I think? Our guide told us, but I kind of wasn’t listening, heh. Anyway…”
He stepped over and through a brushage, his amatuar cameraman following him as he did. “Everybody told us it’s really dangerous, but did we listen? Nope! If nobody else is going to try and film an uncontacted tribe doing a dope-ass ritual, who will? No one! That’s who. We’re like modern day pioneers, discovering America and all that.” He smiled lewdly. “From what I’ve heard, they’re gonna sacrifice a poor virgin to their dark, evil god, Mor’tus. So, heh, you know, we might get to see something pretty interesting, you know?”
He looked at Leath for a long second. “Dude, cut.”
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“Oh, yeah,” Leath mumbled, putting down the video camera.
David pulled a hand through his hair. “And now, we’re just going to do some hand-held stuff, and I’ll walk around and say I’m lost, and then you’ll come into view and I’ll film you, okay?”
“I don’t know about this,” Cathy said, not even dressed in the costume. “This isn’t exactly what you said in the ad.”
“How is it not like the ad?” David asked. “Unless you see me in a Willy Wonka costume, isn’t this just like the ad? If I remember right, I even wrote that I’d cover travelling expenses, which I graciously did.”
She frowned. Unfortunately, Cathy didn’t look all that tribal, whether she was in a costume or not. Brown hair, pale complexion… They’d had to bring contact lenses just to cover up her bright green eyes, but she wasn’t even wearing those, either. Very unprofessional, all and all. “You didn’t write that we’d been in the blasted Amazon rainforest!”
“I wrote ‘filming on location,’ didn’t I? Where’d you think I was gonna put you, my own backyard?” He scoffed. “Really, if you were so against this, you would’ve said something when I gave you the aeroplane tickets. I mean, come on. Or did a three-week trip to the Amazon scream ‘dream vacation’ to you?”
She bit together, wanting to bark back but ultimately finding herself unable to. “Fine,” she grumbled. “But turn away while I do it, okay?”
“I swear it,” David lied.
A few minutes later, she was all dolled up. She looked about as authentically savage as blackface in a movie, but they hadn’t expected any better, either. There was only one final touch…
David held up a ball of mud to her face.
She stared at it as though it was radioactive. She glaced at his face. It took a few seconds for her to understand what he wanted. “N-, no, please! I spent like an hour putting this on; I’m not letting you smear mud all over that!”
“Do tribe women wear make up?” David asked, wiggling the dirty thing back and forth.
She pulled her lips tight and gulped. “I am never working with you again.”
David shrugged indifferently and dumped the lump in her unwilling hands. He couldn’t say he hated watching her smother all exposed limbs with the dirty goop, but he still tried to at least appear uninterested. Once she was done, she still looked nothing like a savage, but it would be enough to fool whatever droob watched their little ‘found footage’ film.