Chapter 1: Strangers When We Meet

"Quiet on the set!" an assistant director called.

Another voice off to one side called out in a tired drone, "Scene forty-seven, take fifty-what-the-hell-ever-we-are-up-to, roll 'em."

The realistic Styrofoam brick wall in front of the camera exploded outward, bricks and debris scattered in all directions as Amanda Lust of the Thirtieth Century slammed her way through, took three great strides forward and jumped over the edge of the building onto a preloaded springboard hidden from the view of camera.

The powerful spring threw Amanda Lust almost thirty feet straight up into the air where she caught a trailing rope that hung down from an open sided futuristic looking helicopter. The bad guys forgot to reel it back in after they used it for some implausible task or other.

To the viewer, Amanda appeared to flow up the rope and into the open side of the helicopter. Two male bodies fell out and landed hard on the ground. They each bounced one time. Meanwhile, back up in the air, Amanda appeared in the side door of the machine. She supported an obviously injured man.

"Throw your legs around me and hang on. It's going to be a hard landing!" she shouted over the noise of the noise of the engine and the churning blades.

"Hard landing hell, I'm so hard right now my dick is brittle." He moaned as she swept him around in front of her, jumped out the side of the helicopter and plummeted straight down thirty feet to land with unerring accuracy in the center of the safety net.

She kept hold of him, rolled off the edge of the net and landed on the waiting airbag. "Oh fu-u-uck!" the stuntman screamed as they landed and rolled off onto a heavy foam pad. His face ended up right between her breasts. His tongue made an involuntary pass across her left breast. A "how did I get so lucky?" grin crinkled his face.

Amanda wiggled out from under him, bent over and kissed his lips. Her tongue made a sensuous flicker across his mouth. Then she straightened up in very slow motion and told him, "Go find a corner and play with yourself."

A hand held digital camera caught all the byplay. That bit of not very spontaneous action was supposed to be "smuggled out" and would soon appear on blogs and websites all around the world. The studio bean counters estimated another ten million dollars in ticket sales from that minute and a half clip, perhaps five times that. Hans Steiner, president of Steiner Productions, had taken the famous "Paris Hilton Blow Job" caught on infra-red camera by a freelance reporter and turned it into a sales gimmick. The way the stuntman had rubbed his nose against Amanda's bare belly as she wiggled out from under him was worth at least another million in ticket sales.

"Amanda, dear girl, you must look resolute and heroic when you make the jump. It is crucial to the theme as a whole. You merely looked irritated when you hopped out of that airplane." Alvin Duckworth waddled delicately over to Amanda Lust of the Thirtieth Century. He looked every bit the put upon director of meaningful movies. He sighed, a delicate, dramatic sigh and added, "Please show some emotion in the next take. This scene is holding up production.

Amanda did a back flip from a squatting position and landed on the ground at the director's feet, her barely covered everything was aimed directly at his face. He blanched, drew a hand defensively across his eyes and yelled, "Get that thing out of my face. God, what an ugly sight! I'm going to be ill."

Amanda slowly stood up to her imposing six feet plus two inches and took a deep breath that threatened to dislodge the bronze colored pasties that covered her nipples and left her imposing breasts free to jiggle as she moved. Her deep chest expanded as she drew in a deep breath. Her face darkened into an angry, feral scowl.

Bud Hastings, the stunt man realized she was about to beat the snot out of Alvin Duckworth, sensitive director and maker of meaningful films. "Stop," Bud told her in a low voice.

She stopped her approach, took another deep breath and forced herself to not turn Alvin into road kill. In a deadly voice she told the director of meaningful films, "That was all you get, you simpering ass. What you already have in the can is all you get." Over her shoulder, she said, "Come on Bud, let's get the hell out of here. I would like a lift to the studio office. I rode out with that posturing fool this morning."

They went out to the parking area and mounted Bud's motorcycle. A minute later he stopped his Harley Davidson Sportster in front of the studio offices and Amanda stepped off.

Amanda Lust, action movie heroine extraordinaire, stormed into the producer's office. "Hans, you son of a bitch, I've had it with you and your games. I will not tolerate your bull crap any more. This is it. I told you before I never wanted work on any picture your friend Ducky directed, ever again. Let's change that to, I will never do a picture evenly remotely associated with him in any way shape or form."

She paused to take another deep breath, "I will never knowingly even step foot on a set I know he is on. That prissy, pissy fat little toad brought the last Avenger episode in way the hell over budget and in twice the time it should have taken to put it in the can. That artistic little clown that waddles like a penguin is trying to make The Lustful Avenger 6 into 'a classic and a statement of the ills of our society.' There is absolutely no way in hell I will ever work with that artistic toad ever again."

"In the first place, I am not a great actor, actually not much of an actor at all. You know it; I know it and the people that go see my pictures don't give a damn about it. They like to check out my almost naked body. They like the action. I kick the hell out of the bad guys, manage to hint that I'm going to get laid by my costar and perhaps a few more in the next installment and that the world is once more safe for truth, democracy and what the hell ever comes next."

Hans Steiner held up a placating hand, "Alvin Duckworth is an artist who is sought after by producers all over the world," he told Amanda in a patient voice. "He and I felt we could expand your marketability by adding more depth to the storyline. Amanda, you must move forward. I have a vision..."

"Fuck you, fuck your vision and move forward on this," Amanda answered as she grabbed her crotch. "My contract is due for renewal in a few weeks, so renew it."

She paused at the door, "Or don't. Right now I don't care either way. Talk to Sam about it. I have about had it with all the bull shit that goes on in this studio lately. I would much rather work with Chuck Norris or Stallone. Now there are two old men who know how to put action pictures together in a proper manner."

She called over her shoulder as she went out the door, "I'll be at my place in San Diego if you need to contact me. But it had better be an emergency." She stormed out the office and left Hans Steiner in an unhappy quandary. Either Steiner would lose Amanda Lust, the top money maker at Steiner Productions, or he would be forced to go back on his word to his long time and dearest friend, Alvin Duckworth. It meant he must renege on a promise that Alvin would direct Amanda's next three action adventure movies and turn them into epics that even the big boys at Columbia would respect. Hans craved peer respect with all his very being.

He speed dialed his friend. When Alvin answered, Hans told him, "Alvin, Amanda refuses to sign a new contract if you are in the picture. I'll help you get situated with Green Bee or Columbia if I can. Bye now." He hung up fast. He did not care to give the dumbfounded friend a chance to protest. On the other end of the line, a now unemployed director of artistic films contemplated suicide, then decided to get drunk instead.

Steiner had already put the phone call out of his mind as he went on to the more important business, "What message does my snap brim hat convey to the world at large? Would a monocle help my image?"

Amanda Lust was the action super heroine who almost had it all. Her birth name actually was Amanda Louise Lusty. Her Father was John Lusty, devout Christian and ardent admirer of his good buddy Jesus. He loved the sly remarks his name generated in Christian circles when someone referred to him as "Lusty John. Otherwise the only time he ever smiled was when he heard a Catholic or a Mormon died or suffered great loss. John Lusty was a devout fundamentalist. Even Missionary Baptists were suspected of harboring modernist views.

Amanda's mother's maiden name was Melody Loving. When she married John she became Melody Loving Lusty. Her name caused her much embarrassment. She had no sense of humor, merely a fundamentalist's sense of duty.

No studio flack in his wildest drug induced dreams could have come up with such a perfect pedigree. Hans decided to drop the "y" off the end of her last name. Someone pointed out to him that such a big, muscular lady named "Lusty" might be considered a dyke, so the final "y" was dropped. Amanda loved the change.

Although barely twenty-four years of age, she had already become the action heroine all the pre-teen, teen age and post-teen action movie buffs rated number one. Amanda could memorize her lines with no problem at all, usually with one single read through of the script. She could even recite her lines with no difficulty at all. What she needed was that rare quality called acting ability.

Her problem was in her delivery; Amanda had two emotions she could bring to the camera, anger and happiness, mad or glad. Sometimes, on very rare occasions, she even managed to project a little sad. Nearly all shades of emotion in between mad and glad were beyond her ability to express. In real life those were the only two emotions Amanda had ever experienced, glad or mad.

"My wife's vibrator shows more emotion than Amanda does when she's on camera," an assistant director once said. "If she wasn't so photogenic, she would have to cheat some poor illegal out of a job picking lettuce. I don't know why, but the damned camera loves her. Even without makeup she projects better than all the others wearing a ton of Max Factor." The assistant director was correct, except Amanda did show a little more feeling than a vibrator, not much, just a wee bit more emotion.

As for Amanda, she was twenty-four years old, a seriously dedicated bodybuilder, martial artist and all around horny athlete. She was also a nationally-rated rock climber. Even though she had been shorted where acting ability was concerned, her movies sold a lot of tickets. She made the big money because her ruggedly sensual female features inspired trust in women, while their boyfriends all wanted to fuck Amanda until her ears fell off. Her lithe muscular body jumped right off the screen at the viewer. Amanda Lust was all the camera saw when she was in front of it.

The critics hated her and her fans loved her. To them, her fans, she could do no wrong. As far as the critics were concerned, she never did anything right. The directors told the writers to work around her lack of acting ability, which they did. Amanda had more one-liners than even Arnold when he first started his acting career. This also meant that everyone who worked on the increasingly popular Amanda Lust movies prospered.

Because the camera loved her, it was just as her agent and best friend Sam Cashman said over and over, "Hey, she looks so damned good up there on the screen she doesn't need to have much talent. All the guys from nine to ninety-nine want to take her to bed and crawl her bones. The girls want to be just like her and they get the guys to pay for the tickets to take them to see her pictures. What else in life do we need? We got it all..."

Of course Amanda was all too well aware that her numbers at the box office would begin to sag just about the same time her abs, boobs and butt cheeks did. To keep that day of reckoning far in the future she followed a rigid lifestyle. She ate a simple diet, stayed away from drugs and drank only a very little wine on rare occasions.

She also saved and invested her money against that day when she could no longer throw space aliens through windows and knock down brick walls with a shrug of her powerful shoulders. As far as Amanda Lust was concerned, life was beautiful and uncomplicated. She was young, wealthy, healthy and got laid whenever she so desired, which was often. This was how her life went until that one special day when she met him...

He had just turned twenty-two and recently graduated from the college run by his church. He was also a total innocent. No female had ever touched his bare bottom since his mother finished potty training him three years after he was born. The private religious school he attended through college was designed to prepare rich, modern fundamentalist guys for their equally unprepared but moneyed fundamentalist wives- to-be.

These future husbands learned very early on that masturbation made their eyes weak and their ears fall off or something equally horrible and mysterious. Besides, Jesus would definitely not approve. Most of the boys and young men decided glasses or contacts wouldn't be too bad and did what boys have done ever since boys were first invented. They carefully checked their hands each morning for signs of peter wear and hairy palms. Besides, they figured, what Jesus did not see he could not get too uptight about. So they masturbated in the dark, after bedtime.

For them the mysteries of sex were all very hush-hush and considered an inappropriate subject for girls and boys of any age to be concerned with until after the marriage ceremony. Then they would get all the trial and error on the job training they desired. Unfortunately, this often led to, among other things, unresolved sexual identities, gay second marriages and other catastrophic occurrences polite Christians never mentioned to each other except in nervous titters and giggles.

Finally, one bright spring day, Mark Cantrell received a calling from God Himself to serve in the mission field. He knew this was so because Reverend Billy Joe Thorny told him how he personally had a revelation.