Time minus 29 hours 40 minutes

St Lucas
Storm, Marcus, I was pleasantly surprised you guys were even awake, much less working at four in the morning.

Storm
A client is doing a live interview in Melbourne at the moment, and we need to monitor all the media outlets here and in London. We tend to babysit our projects until they’re complete.

St Lucas
What did you both do to your hair? Marcus, pink looks beautiful with your skin tone.

Marcus
Thanks. I chickened out at the last minute. Storm, however, went hell for steel grey.

St Lucas
That’s the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.

Storm
Thank you.

St Lucas
Well, you guys are professional, discreet and super talented magicians. Which is why I’m here.

Marcus
We’re listening.

St Lucas
This upcoming assignment is going to be the mad wood of mass marketing. But first, we need a sanctuary. We need a cone of silence.

Marcus
Got it. Turning off mobile devices.

Storm
Unplug the phone.

Marcus
I’ll set the windows to opaque. And…let us pray.

St Lucas
I need a publicity blitz the likes of which has never been seen. I need all eyes on this. I need everyone eating, drinking, dreaming this.

Storm
We’re with you. Every knee will bow, and every tongue will confess.

St Lucas
To that extent. Ladies, I want The Rapture. I need you to blur the lines between fiction and non fiction. It’s for an upcoming movie. But I want it to look like it’s not a movie.

Storm
Alright.

St Lucas
When I say “blur the lines”, I mean that elements of the campaign have to look real. If…someone …. an objective … statistician, let’s say, were looking at the data, that person should be convinced that this is real.

Storm
Alright.

St Lucas
The outcomes could be ordinary people lobbying the Government to release secrets. I want CSpan, PBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, CBS, CNN, BBC, Sky and Al Jazeera, did I miss anyone? Covering a controversy we engineered, twenty four, seven, three sixty five. Wars will cease fire to catch the latest details. I want so much noise about it that when the film comes out, people will not even know they were victims of an epic brainwash.

Marcus
Okay, right away I can think of a few things we can bounce off you.

St Lucas
Before you do that, there’s one more thing. And this is really important. I need all of this to happen in the next twenty nine hours and … thirty minutes. That’s why I’m here. I need the Wonder Twins.

Marcus
We’ve done this before, so we have an idea what you need. You’re saying you need a fake campaign to start a real one. Right?

St Lucas
Yes. Exactly.

Storm
We can do that. First, we need to understand exactly what we’re working with.

St Lucas
Alright. Look at these stills.