The Blush Temple stood behind the derelict movie lot in downtown Porto. All agreed it was ‘estranha’ — strange. It was three years old, having been erected by an army of quasi-enslaved North Africans for the production of “Tempesta: Lady of Pain,” a two-hour shlock that bombed and ultimately busted the studio’s entire fantasy division, and whose plot was universally panned as both incomprehensible and clichè.
The entire lot had been abandoned following the film’s failing, and the North Africans had occupied the property for a time, demanding an additional Euro a day. Following their deportation, The Blush Temple was soon discovered by three adventurous scamps from the local Roma encampment, whose daily investigations unearthed fallen costumes, scripts, and even a single clapperboard. In delight, the children smoked cigarettes while they recited lines from "Tempesta" in mocking voices, and clacked the clapperboards mouth open and closed, calling “scene!” and “cut!” and “action!”
In time, the three Roma children — Vee, Plenti, and Casper — performed the script with such regularity that they came to achieve a familiarity with the brief and shallow world of “Tempesta” that eclipsed outside reality in both vividity and importance, leading them, after a single year of recitations, to endeavour toward the real thing, the ‘performa maxima’, in which the entire world would be their stage. The children walked home that evening in full costume, sharing a cigarette and holding hands, bobbing up and down beneath the blood red setting sun, each wearing expressions of absolute conviction upon their precocious olive faces.
Vee, who played Tempesta herself, practised her lines outside the trailer while Plenti and Casper, who played the nefarious Omdo twins, beat Vee’s parents to death with bats and bricks. Now appropriately orphaned, Vee began her ‘accumulation arc’, in which she discovered her latent power of turning ‘pain-to-strength’ and encountering a band of wholesome outlaws (whose actors she found drunk but complaint at a local bar). In this way, the children charted the hero’s journey for the span of a brief, boiling Porto afternoon, before confronting one another beneath the Blush Temple at sunset, where Vee, initially outmatched and deeply wounded, stuck herself full of pins, and harnessed the resulting 'pain-to-strength' to overwhelm and annihilate the Omdo twins, before ultimately succumbing herself.
Their bodies were found the next day. A headline ran: “Gypsy Rigamarole: Feral Children Reenact Boorish Schlockfest.” The resulting press attention saw “Tempesta: Lady of Pain” renter its theatrical run, turn a massive profit, and gain a cult following.
Few remember the children’s name; those that do exalt them as the last true thespians to walk the earth.