theater tech janka ❤️
two assholes locked in the booth with each other. zanka’s the lighting designer who got stuck running board for some reason and jabber’s the audio tech who’s ragebaiting him constantly
they’re working for a local/non union theater so it’s a super cramped space basically ontop of each other— god forbid either of them leave the other alone about the lack of space either… zanka puts a line of spike tape down the center of the desk & jabber peels it up and tapes his computer shut. zanka resets the eq on jabber’s board. jabber refocuses a light slightly to the left. they are both assholes. the stage manager will kill them in 20 minutes. the both of them think they will win this war.
on the flip side; jabber who sees zanka painting the stage with color, focusing life into a once flat view. finding every hue hiding in the background and pulling on that thread, bringing depth into everything onstage. jabber knows he’s not supposed to be aware that the lights are changing at all— merely an addition to the emotional experience of theater, yet he can’t help but think of how with every shift the scene looks better and better.
zanka who watches jabber listen to everything and anything, hair pulled back to expose ears full of piercings. jabber works like a machine, hands flying across knobs and making every word sound perfect. when jabber’s done it’s hard to tell that anyone has a mic on, everyone so perfectly blended and amplified that you wouldn’t believe that their voices were coming through a speaker. zanka thinks about the mixed metals on the other man’s ear, catching the colorful pinprick lights on the soundboard and bending them in the reflection, a testament to his profession. he wonders how jabber would look under his lights, cast in shades of indigo, magenta, mauve, rose— if the color would paint him into something even more beautiful than he already was.
(though, when something inevitably goes wrong, they are NAWT missing the chance to dunk on the other)
