guts

tone with her.
“What do we do after the Deadly Doctor?” she asked, innocently, looking around at the cream-and-red set, four couches, a couple of marble columns, and a lot of draperies and mirrors. And the series of red ropes lying about. It wasn’t an elaborate set; the extras had provided much of the ornament on the Caligula film, and the party picture hadn’t needed much more. “It ought to be something demonic. I’d thought Aztec—”
Vidal shook his head emphatically; the one place where she trusted his judgment over hers was in marketing. Somehow he always anticipated what the customers were going to buy. “Not yet. I don’t think the customers are going to be ready for anything that exotic yet. It requires too much imagination, and the lead characters are the wrong color. We’ll lose a lot of our Southern audience. They want handsome white men as their protagonists. We need something—steamy—decadent—depraved, debauched. Exotic, but not something where the customer can’t identify with the master character—”
He shook his head, unable to come up with anything. On reflection, Aurilia agreed with him. She searched for a subject that might do, and suddenly a most unlikely source of inspiration flashed into her mind.
It was the rack of paperbacks at the airport; fully half of them were lurid romances, and she remembered thinking at the time that taken with a little less sugar and allowing the “villain” to win, the plots weren’t all that different from Adder’s Fork productions. Passion’s Frenzied Fury, Harem Nights, Wild Moon Rising, they featured stupid, sweet and submissive heroines and some villains who certainly fit the “exotic, depraved, and debauched” description.
“What about a harem thing?” she asked. “We could re‑use most of the Caligula set. . . .” But Arabs were not in particularly good odor at the moment, not even with the Adder’s Fork customers. And the master character in a harem theme would have to be an Arab. “No, how about pirates; we could do the same there, use this set for the pirate captain’s cabin, with one couch and a couple of sea-chests full of bondage gear. The customers won’t know they didn’t have reclining couches on ships, and frankly, I doubt they’ll care. We can open with a boarding party, kill off a few constructs, lots of blood and guts there, take prisoners, and