[ Theatre's Backstage ]
The hallway behind the screening auditorium buzzed with activity—festival staff exchanging checklists, crew collecting leftover press passes, and a few stray critics searching for the elusive director.
Elian remained in the shadowed corridor behind the technical control room, shoulders slightly hunched, a half-finished bottle of water in hand. Miraal and Shaan had stepped aside for press duties, giving him a moment to breathe.
That's when he saw her.
A woman in her early thirties, standing alone near the emergency exit. Crisp dark blazer, glasses low on her nose, holding a thin leather portfolio.
She wasn't looking around like the others.
She was looking directly at him.
---
She approached calmly, almost politely, as if she were returning a book.
"Elian Varis," she said, her tone neutral but edged.
"Well hello" he replied, little confused.
"I'm Anaisha Raut. We went to the same script lab three years ago. I'm surprised you don't remember."
Elian sifted through the name. A faint bell rang. The internship program in Delhi. She'd written something ambitious—a dystopian screenplay about identity theft and fractured timelines.
"I remember your work," he said slowly.
She didn't smile.
Instead, she pulled a slim folder from her case and handed it to him. "Then maybe you remember this."
He took it—and froze.
Inside was a printed screenplay. Roughly formatted. Handwritten notes on the sides. The title at the top read:
"Driftline – Draft Zero"
And beneath it: Story by Anaisha Raut & Elian Varis.
Elian's stomach knotted.
This was real. He had worked on this. It was from the time before his transmigration—before the system, before the clean slate. Back when his name was still in messy ink at the bottom of a hundred forgotten Google Docs.
---
He flipped through the first few pages.
It was raw, unpolished, full of flaws—but there it was. A sci-fi story about a society that erased memories to control free will, and a technician who discovers a flaw in the system.
A familiar theme.
"You submitted this, didn't you?" Anaisha asked flatly. "Years later. Stripped of my name. I only recognized it after watching Echo Maze. The emotional core—the concept of memory as identity—it's evolved, but the skeleton is the same."
Elian's mind raced.
She wasn't entirely wrong. His current story had evolved, mutated, grown from a hundred influences… but the seed might've come from that draft. The system had pulled it from his mental archive and offered it as a foundation during development. He hadn't even consciously remembered.
"I didn't submit that version," he said carefully. "This story changed. It grew into something new."
"Maybe," Anaisha said. "But it started with us. And I want credit."
She wasn't yelling. She wasn't threatening legal action.
Her calmness made it worse.
---
[Choices, Leverage, and Tension]
"I'm not looking for money," she added. "Just acknowledgment. A mention. A retroactive co-story credit."
Elian said nothing for a long moment.
His system pinged silently in his mind:
[Detected anomaly: External party recognizes source inspiration of project.
Recommendation: Engage with caution. Opportunity to defuse or escalate.]
"Why now?" he asked. "You waited until the premiere."
"Because now you can't bury it quietly," she said. "Now people are watching."
There was no malice in her eyes. Just… expectation.
He looked down at the folder again. His name. Her notes. His annotations. The echoes were undeniable.
Elian took a slow breath.
"Let me think it over."
Anaisha nodded once. "You have three days. After that, I go public."
She turned and left, vanishing into the chaos of backstage traffic.
---
[Later That Night – Alone in the Apartment]
Elian sat at his desk, the folder open beside him.
The screen of his laptop blinked with emails: offers, invites, praise.
But none of it touched him.
He clicked open a blank document.
The title bar read: "Driftline – Final Acknowledgment Draft."
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
Some part of him knew the system would offer a way out—spin it, bury it, distract the media.
But something deeper told him: maybe this wasn't a mistake.
Maybe it was the price of borrowing too much from a life he'd tried to leave behind.
And maybe, just maybe…
It was time to give credit where it was due.