She was very pretty. Long brown hair, expressive blue eyes under elegant eyebrows, sun-tanned skin, a very warm smile on her face. Slim, but athletic body - she did a lot of sports in her spare time, and it showed. Alright, let us rephrase that: She was beautiful. Breathtakingly gorgeous!

Too bad what was about to happen to her...

She was sitting on a narrow bed, tears in her frightfully opened eyes as the masked man beside her pressed a gun to her forehead. Her hands and feet were bound, and she had a gag in her mouth. Trembling with fear she listened to the phone call that the masked man was having right beside her - a very agitated call. He was yelling most of the time.

"You damn son of a... You messed it up! Alright, damn you, but don't expect me to like it! I really don't want to do this." And with a final grunt of disapproval he ended the call and threw the cellphone aside. The gun in his hand made a terrifying click as he pulled the hammer back.

"Now just be good and still, kid!" he mumbled towards his young captive. "This will only take a second..."

She heard something else - voices out side the door to her room. Someone was coming. She didn't recognize any of those voices - they didn't belong to any of the kidnappers she had met so far. Were they here to rescue her? Her spirits lifted for a brief moment of hope. And it seemed as if she was right. The voices approached the door, two of them, and they were discussing things as if they had no worries that the kidnappers might hear them. She threw a side glance over the barrel of the gun into the eyes of the masked man - the only part of his face that the mask left uncovered. She could see uncertainty in them. They were moving around erratically, mirroring the conflict in his mind - should he get to the door to intercept them or do his job first?

But her hope vanished as she saw how his finger moved. Please don't...

He pulled the trigger.

"Bang!"

The door opened. Two teenage boys entered the room to see the carnage that had unfolded in here. "You're too late!" the masked man announced to them, lifting his mask so everybody could see the broad grin in his young face. "I just shot her."

Both newcomers groaned and rolled their eyes. "Cut!" hissed one of them, a chubby boy with short brown hair and glasses who looked exactly like one of those kids who got beaten up in a schoolyard because he liked computers. Right now his look through very thick glasses held together by a thin steel frame was anything but amused.

The other one was pretty healthy himself, but managed to hide part of it by a big, loosely falling shirt. Throwing his hands around in exaggerated theatrics, something that he was known for and loved to do, he put the disapproval of his partner into words: "Sören, you are not supposed to shoot her before... No, you are not supposed to shoot her at all!"

"Exactly", confirmed the chubby one grimly. "Has nobody here read the script?"

A soft muffled mumbling came from the bed that the other guys understood as the girl's attempt to say: "I have." She probably would have raised her hand, hadn't her wrist been tied behind her back. The two pages of script, hastily printed two hours ago before the shoot, were lying beside her on the bed to be utterly ignored by everyone else involved.

"At least Katrin wasn't laughing her butt off like in the last two takes," came from the cameraman as he finally turned the camcorder off. He was also wearing a mask - just for fun, and because he would take on the role of a kidnapper himself.

"Well, that's a relief." Another sigh came from the chubby boy, the sigh of a person that was yearning for a stiff drink despite the fact that he was barely seventeen years old and that it wasn't even four in the afternoon yet. "Alright, let's get back to position, people! I would like to wrap this thing up before my parents come home and wonder what the hell we're doing here."The side glance he threw the trussed up teenage girl on the guest bed lasted longer than it normally should. But nobody else noticed it.

So they went back to their starting positions to shoot another take of the movie scene - with hardly more success than the last one. The movie shoot went on all the afternoon until they decided that they had enough material for the scene to be complete. Afterwards they sat down in the living room in front of the TV to look through the scenes - the only scenes of this long movie project that would ever be shot. They never touched this project ever again.