Miranda had decorated the dead walls of her own stage with posters and 
photos of role models, largely actresses from twentieth-century passives. She 
had a chair in the corner for roles that involved sitting down. There was also 
a tiny coffee table where she set down her triple latte, a two-liter bottle of 
mineral water, and a box of throat lozenges. Then she peeled down to a black 
leotard and tights, hanging her street clothes on a tree by the door. Another 
ractor might have gone nude, worn street clothes, or tried to match her costume 
to the role she'd be playing, if she were lucky enough to know in advance. At 
the moment, though, Miranda never knew. She had standing bids on Kate in the 
ractive version of Taming of the Shrew (which was a butcherous 
kludge, but popular among a certain sort of male user); Scarlett O'Hara in the 
ractive Gone With the Wind; a double agent named Ilse in an espionage 
thriller set on a train passing through Nazi Germany; and Rhea, a 
neo-Victorian damsel in distress in Silk Road, an adventure-comedy-romance ractive 
set on the wrong side of contemporary Shanghai. She'd created that role. After 
the good review had come in ("a remarkably Rhea-listic portrayal by newcomer 
Miranda Redpath!") she had played little else for a couple of months,
even though her bid was so steep that most users opted for one of the 
understudies or contented themselves with watching passively for one-tenth the 
price. But the distributor had botched the PR targeting when they tried to take 
it beyond the Shanghai market, and so now Silk Road was in limbo 
while various heads rolled.