[EP6] When the Mood Strikes
Sometimes it’s not a mood—it’s a mutiny.
[Scene opens in the Mansion’s Parlor with sunlight bleeding gold across the floor. A breeze stirs the sheer curtains. There’s a scent of citrus and distant memory in the air. Everyone is gathered, more or less. Emotionally volatile. Beautifully alive.]
Casper: [lounging with theatrical carelessness on the back of a velvet couch, shirt open, one thigh exposed like it’s part of the sermon] Ah, the sun today—it doesn't shine, it devours. It drapes itself across skin like it’s been starved for flesh. Have you seen her?—no, not her name, her geometry. The curve of the lower back just above the bikini line? It’s not erotic, it’s sacred calligraphy. And I would trace it until my fingers bled devotion.
Trevor: [sitting upright, surrounded by ledgers and stress, speaks through clenched composure]
Casper. For the love of emotional protocol, could we not open today’s meeting with a soliloquy about sunscreen and sex appeal? Simon—Simon—is actively leaning toward you and it’s disturbing my sense of reality.
Simon: [the potted plant—leans further. A single leaf trembles in agreement.]
Casper: [eyes lock onto Simon with theatrical reverence—his voice drops to a near-whisper, but every syllable glows] Ah...You see? Even the flora agrees. Even the green and silent among us knows what holiness looks like when it walks barefoot across a tile floor and stretches to open a window.
That leaf—that trembling leaf—it’s not a shiver. It’s ecstasy. It’s the gasp of something rooted, suddenly reminded of motion. Simon, my chlorophyll-coated companion,
you know the truth. You feel it in your xylem when she laughs. When she bends slightly at the waist to pick up her dropped keys. When sunlight tattoos the freckles on her thighs like constellations only the worthy are allowed to read.
This is not about sex. This is about worship. About the unbearable generosity of form.
The cruelty of casual godhood—a woman existing with no idea she’s undoing the very fabric of reality with each unhurried step.
Simon leaned. And I, too, am undone.
[He collapses slowly onto the couch like a bishop slain in spirit. The room falls reverently silent… except for Dion quietly snapping.]
Cyril: [setting his teacup down with surgical grace, his voice like silk drawn over marble] Casper, while I deeply admire the lyrical fervor of your current thesis, might I offer a line of inquiry—one braided of cultural conditioning, aesthetic philosophy, and embodied phenomenology?
Do you believe that women come to understand what is visually or socially “effective”—that is, captivating, influential, or resonant—primarily through their attunement to the male gaze and its conditioned feedback?
Or is there a parallel, inward-facing aesthetic intuition at play—one developed in solitude, wherein a woman perceives herself in the mirror not as object, but as invocation—judging what she wears not by who will look, but by how she feels when she does?
And further—do these twin forces of outer reaction and inner resonance operate in conflict, or are they symbiotic—forming a mythic feedback loop wherein desire is both shaped by, and actively shaping, perception?
Lastly, and perhaps most curiously—how does this interplay evolve when we account for intra-feminine preening? That is: the ritual of dressing not for the male gaze, nor even the mirror, but for the unspoken currency of female-to-female approval, competition, admiration, and aesthetic consumption?
Casper: [hand to chest, wounded in performance] Darling Cyril, you wound me with such academic precision. Let me answer in language your spreadsheets can’t hold.
They dress not to be seen, but to become the spell. And when it lands? Oh, when it lands—my god—It’s not visibility. It’s resonance. It’s the whole fucking shoreline pausing for a single exposed collarbone.
Lenny: [sliding in silently, setting down a thick folder like a priest offering sacrament] I’ve assembled a comparative framework. Seven cultures. Four centuries. The intersection of modesty, desire, and fabric density. Also a bar graph on cleavage as social leverage.
Kurt: [grabs the folder with mild hostility and secret hope] If this doesn’t include at least one picture of ass, I’m flipping the table.
Artie: [lying on the floor surrounded by crayon chaos, tongue sticking out slightly as he sketches] Hey Cas, what's another word for... um… “deliciously distracting?” 'Cause I’m drawing those big swishy hips you were talkin’ about and I wanna name it right.
I got “buh-doo-shus bounce-backs” so far, but then I ran outta room and just drew a heart with fire in it.
Also, if someone’s tits are like… “mountains of softness,” is it okay if I draw a sunset behind them? Like the kind that makes you feel all sleepy and warm?
Casper: [eyes glittering, crawling across the back of the couch like a jungle cat made of satin] Sweet Artie, call them sonnets of flesh—they deserve rhythm, not just rhyme. And if they sway like poetry, it’s only right we recite them with our hands.
Nels: [from his corner of ancient grace, voice soft but weighted with scripture] "Thy neck is like the tower of ivory..." The Song of Songs does not blush. It was never afraid of a well-formed thigh.
Dion: [sprawled across a settee like temptation made flesh, swirling wine lazily] Get it, boy. Mmm. If the Lord didn't want us hungry, He wouldn't have put the sun behind her hips.
Trevor: [head in hands] We had a budget meeting scheduled. There were color-coded agenda items.
Cyril: [sipping tea, unbothered] Sometimes the soul votes. And today, it voted lust in metaphor.
Casper: [rising now, one foot on the armrest like he’s conducting an orchestra of eros] You see? This—this is the gospel. The gospel of sun on skin. The gospel of a body walking by unaware it just converted a man to worship. Trevor, let me have this day. Tomorrow you may balance your budgets. Today we balance our blood.
Trevor: [deep sigh, muttering] ...Simon betrayed me.
[And so the sun dipped, the room settled, and Casper—sated but still smoldering—returned to silence. Not because the fire had died, but because some flames know when to rest.]
End Session.