December 24th [COMPLETED]

Chapter 1: Twenty

"Cue the confetti...Ready the pyro... Finale in three..."

The instructions came through her headset but they were not for Georgiana Burns. Georgiana stayed right where she was, transfixed by what was happening on stage twenty feet in front of her. With one leg tucked underneath her and the other mindlessly spinning her back and forth in her swivel chair, George (as she was commonly called) waited with her hands poised over her controls. She might have looked cool on the outside, casual, maybe even a little bored, but George was anything but.

She waited, watching alongside the rest of the thirty thousand crowd filling the Los Angeles Staples Center as Wes Keats, frontman for the Faded Relics, walked down the catwalk that led from the main stage to the b-stage. His band followed right behind him. George's hands twitched when the rock-and-roll icon came to a stop at the end of the stage. Her hands twitched again as he pulled his microphone away from his mouth, took a deep breath, and then started to lean forward. The note was coming, the reason George's hands were frozen in place, was coming.

And then... it came. The note was glorious and George was the one making sure the legend's lungs and air capacity didn't blow out the speaker system in the arena, didn't create any kind of feedback, hurting people's ears and threatening the magic of the moment.

The crowd went wild for the note, for the confetti, for the pyro shooting from the main stage at a safe distance from the band. George looked over her shoulder and made eye contact with her boss. As always, he was hovering a few feet away. Over the last six months, George had gotten used to Frank's constant gaze as he watched her every move, as he stood ready to take over if there was a problem, if she missed a moment or hit a snag. But six months into her newest job on tour and George could engineer the sound for a show blindfolded. Frank gave her a nod and a hint of a smile. He might as well have pulled her into a bear hug and slapped her on the back with a warm "Great job, kid" as far as George was concerned.

George couldn't have missed the note if she tried. She had seen Wes Keats perform this exact finale in six different cities over the last two weeks. It held the same power and weight every single time, every single time threatening to take George's breath away and steal her attention from her job. But she had been doing the whole tour thing for a long time. George had gotten used to working while in awe of a show by the time she was fifteen years old.

With Wes Keats' final high note, the show ended. He stood with his bandmates at the end of the stage, bowing, and waving to the crowd as the stage slowly lowered itself into the ground. With a final call of "Have a good night" and a plea for everyone to "Have a good Christmas", Wes and the Relics were gone. The show was over. And George was late.

There was no way she wasn't. George had always known she would be but that didn't stop the fire that suddenly itself lit beneath her and had her jumping out of her seat, racing out of the sound booth. All that she left behind were quick farewells and "Merry Christmases" to her fellow sound booth workers. Her boss had been alerted to her need to leave early, her exemption from the hours of work still ahead of them coming down from on high. No one in the sound booth complained. She was the tour manager's daughter, after all.

The overhead lights in the arena came on, exposing the smoke in the air leftover from the pyrotechnics, the audience moving as one at a glacial pace towards the exits. George was sure to get stuck along with the rest of them if her father hadn't thought of a contingency plan. The female security guard who stood at the barricade surrounding the sound booth was already moving when George caught up to her. Sydney (no last name that George knew of), in her stern voice and ex-military manner, had people moving out of the way, forming a tunnel with her commands of "Make way" and "Coming through!", her voice breaking through the overwhelming ambient noise of a post-concert arena.