2. Pro Patronage 101
"Claire, what do you think?"
"Um... there are a lot of people."
"That's it?"
"Was there something else you wished me to say?"
"Then what about you, Master Rin?"
"...Painters have gathered in considerable numbers."
"Such a way with words, the two of you."
Perhaps it was because they'd each specialized in the martial and fine arts rather than letters, but both seemed a little short on vocabulary for occasions like this. Rin had reworded her answer slightly — apparently unwilling to parrot Claire — but stripped down to its bones, she was saying exactly the same thing.
The annex lobby was swarming with people, packed so densely that even pooling every servant employed in the annex couldn't have filled it. Right now it was crammed instead with a motley array of humanity: a man dressed quite respectably, a woman in seedy, shabby garb, an old man wrapped in little better than a tattered mat, and boys and girls wearing proud, defiant expressions.
They differed in age, in gender, in everything else besides — but if they shared a single thing in common, it was this: every last soul among them was a painter.
"Claire, that's exactly one hundred and one, right?"
"I have verified it many times over. No one besides the first-round qualifiers has slipped in uninvited. There were attempts — I crushed every one of them."
"Well, anyone who genuinely broke in uninvited might well have been summarily executed on the spot, so I suppose rough handling was the kinder option."
Granted, I had given those one hundred and one my permission — but at its root, this was the Medici estate. Annex or not, entry by anyone unauthorized was strictly forbidden.
With a hundred and one strangers of utterly unknown temperament huddled together in one place, the knights charged with guarding the annex were run completely ragged. I felt a touch guilty for it, but — consider it fair payback for how sweet your duty has been until now.
Anyway, as I watched the one hundred and one audition participants Rin and I had personally selected with no small satisfaction, Rin spoke to me first. That alone was an achievement worth marking.
"Patron, if I may — why one hundred and one, of all numbers?"
"What do you mean?"
"In selections like this, one usually picks a number that divides cleanly, no? It makes splitting into teams or drawing up brackets that much easier. But one hundred and one is an awkward number, is it not?"
"You sound like you know these selections well. Ever been through one?"
"...It was merely a small question."
"Well, Master Rin's not wrong. A hundred would certainly make running the audition easier than a hundred and one."
"Then why...?"
The truth was simple. The audition program I used to love watching before I was reborn just happened to have one hundred and one contestants. That was the entire reason. Naturally, admitting that out loud was impossible.
"I originally planned on exactly one hundred, but that last painting caught my eye."
"You mean... that special-commendation, last-minute, barely-made-the-cut selection?"
"Yes, that one. You saw it too, didn't you, Master Rin?"
"I did. And I marked it for rejection immediately."
"And I picked it back up."
"That is precisely what I wished to ask about."
Ah. So she hadn't approached me because we were growing closer — she was filing a complaint. A little deflating, but still an improvement over yesterday. At least Rin was letting her real personality peek through, bit by bit.
"That painting — The Reclining Fox — was clearly an unfinished work. The depiction of the fox herself, the star of the piece, was good, down to the finest detail, but the painting had no background whatsoever."
"Worse still, there wasn't even any coloring. A single pencil sketch, and that was all."
"It was a fox and nothing else on a blank canvas. But a painting doesn't strictly need a background, does it?"
"That is not wrong."
"But the fox in the painting was reclining with its legs crossed, head propped up on one arm. An ordinary fox would never strike such a pose — could never. And yet that fox had been drawn for all the world like a human being."
"So that's your objection?"
"Of course not. Fresh perspectives and reinterpretations are always welcome in art — I imagine the painter meant it as a satire of a person as clever and cunning as a fox. My complaint is that after pulling off such a reinterpretation, they left the canvas utterly bare, fox and nothing else. Had they simply drawn a bed beneath the fox, or a hut interior or some domestic scene around it, the painting would have come that much more alive. There is no way the painter who produced this couldn't have known that — which makes it, quite simply, laziness."
"And leaving it uncolored is more of the same?"
"Naturally."
Perhaps the heat of the moment was finally drawing her true nature out of hiding — Rin, who had been speaking through gritted teeth, paused to catch her breath once she'd vented everything. I smiled at the sight of her.
"You're entirely right, Master Rin. Whether the piece was unfinished or the painter was lazy, it had no business squeezing in among the qualifiers."
"Then why on earth—"
"But I'm the one hosting this audition, aren't I? I'm the one paying, aren't I? I simply liked the painting. That's all."
...
Faced with my shameless yet unwavering reply, Rin seemed to lose her tongue for a moment — only her eyes blinked. She faltered several times as though trying to spit out a retort, but at last she bowed her head with a sigh.
"...If that is your will, Patron, then I understand."
"Don't be too disappointed. Everyone has their own personal biases, after all."
"I understand completely."
Her face said she understood nothing of the kind. Well — nothing to be done there. To someone as earnest about painting as Rin, of course it rankled to see a bare pencil sketch selected while the other participants had bled over theirs.
I'd thought it far too half-hearted at first, too, and had nearly failed it on the spot. But when I looked at the painting closely, I could see it — ironically, something Rin couldn't see, but I could. In that painting, I saw masterful craftsmanship.
Which was why I had deliberately chosen it, bringing the total to one hundred and one.
'Of course, I could be imagining it.'
And if it was imagination, the painter would simply wash out in due course. If it wasn't... well, that would be its own kind of problem, but no matter.
Whether my hunch was mere fancy — or a truth too delicate to speak of lightly — it was time to find out.
"Wow, quite a few of them made it in."
"And they're picking exactly one out of all of these...?"
"No need to even look — the answer's obvious. I don't see a single proper painter among them."
"A proper painter would already be painting under someone's patronage. What is it — do you think the world's just too broken to recognize your genius?"
"Why, you little—!"
The annex lobby of the Medici estate. Chandeliers and countless ornaments glittered over a freshly polished marble floor — and standing there were one hundred and one people.
They differed in age, gender, appearance, even temperament — yet every single one of them clutched a painter's kit in hand, brushes and paints and all. The painters gathered here had already grasped that everyone around them was a rival, and the glaring contests had begun in earnest.
At the very back of the room, a pink-haired girl hugged her kit tightly to her chest, her legs trembling. The reason was simple.
'I-If I so much as get a speck of paint on anything, my life is over...!!'
Every ornament arranged throughout the lobby, every snow-white marble pillar, was bearing down on her. For a girl poor in every sense of the word, breaking something and being held liable for it would be the end, plain and simple. The joy of passing the first round lasted only a moment before she found herself bowing her head before an overwhelming opulence she had never once seen in her life.
So terrified of grazing a pillar or dirtying the floor that she stood deliberately on tiptoe, the girl wound tight to her very limit — and just then, someone appeared on the second-floor balcony overlooking the lobby at a glance.
"To the one hundred and one of you who passed the first test — my congratulations, all of you."
"Is... is that him...?"
"The second son of House Medici... I heard he's never done anything of note."
"Shh! Keep your voice down! That man could be our next employer!"
"You hush, too."
THUD!
The instant the man himself appeared — the second son of House Medici, the very person who had summoned every painter here — the lobby erupted into a stir. Then, with a single dull, ponderous sound, silence fell. Behind him stood a female knight of beautiful yet razor-sharp features, and she had stamped her foot exactly once. Confronted with the arrival of a strong one so clearly beyond the human realm, the painters all shut their mouths.
In the lobby gone still in a heartbeat, the second son continued, smiling.
"However, of all of you, only one painter will receive my patronage. The selection begins now."
"It's starting...!!"
"What is it? What's the assignment...?"
"Hah, whatever it is, my skill can handle it!"
"This audition will run for one night and two days, and for its duration no one leaves the annex — aside, of course, from those eliminated along the way. You've all brought your kits, I trust? You'll be painting strictly with your own tools."
They had heard this once before. At his explanation, grim resolve flickered in the painters' eyes. Not one painter among them was anything less than desperate for that patronage — a chance to do nothing but paint, free of every money worry. Who wouldn't burn for it?
And then the second son announced the first task.
"The first thing you will paint is... a beast."
"A beast? Did he say a beast?"
"That's a tough one. I've painted plenty of people, but I've never once painted an animal."
"Can't you just... paint one?"
"Are you an idiot? You'd at least need to know the anatomy of whatever beast you're drawing."
A beast.
Easy to say, genuinely hard to paint — because to draw a beast, you had to know that beast's anatomy, proportions, and appearance down to the last detail. Faced with such a demanding assignment, some wore expressions of despair, while others wore knowing smiles.
But the second son wasn't finished.
"And at the same time, it must also be a human."
"What?"
"A beast that's also a person? What's that supposed to mean?"
"What would a beast look like if it moved the way a human does? That is your first task."
"A beast, and yet a person... could he mean for us to paint a beastfolk?"
"As if that's possible. Beastfolk went extinct over three hundred years ago. And I hear hardly any pictures remain of what they even looked like..."
"You fools. Who told you to paint an actual beastfolk? This task is testing your creativity."
"Time limit: one hour. Naturally, full coloring will be out of the question — a decent sketch is more than enough, so have your piece submitted before time is up. That is all."
One short hour. An annex they could not leave. A deliberately vague task: paint a beast that is also a person. And a hundred rivals besides.
Having said his piece, the second son withdrew — and a few of the more observant painters moved first. They meant to claim the best spots. Laying their paper on the stairs, against the walls, or atop the display cabinets, they set to sketching at once, and with them leading the way, all one hundred and one painters scattered across the lobby, each hunched over their own work.
Into the stillness poured the sound of groans from those deep in deliberation, the scratch of drawing implements, and someone's taut breathing, filling the lobby wall to wall. And while the painters shielded their work from one another's eyes as best they could, desperate not to have it copied—
'Huh...?'
— the pink-haired girl alone went wide-eyed, as though she had glimpsed something in the task that no one else had. Then, her mind made up, she began to sketch. Where the other painters floundered in the swamp of deliberation, her hand flew without hesitation, as if the finished painting already existed inside her head.
And so, though she had started last, the girl was — paradoxically — the first to finish her sketch, and she handed it straight to a servant.
'If it's this... I can do it!'
A spark of hope flared to life in her eyes. After all, of every task that could have been set, this one made the best possible use of the girl's 'experience.'
One hour passed. Demanding as the assignment was, perhaps because everyone present had at least a modicum of genuine skill, only a bare handful ran past the time limit. The servants forgave not a single second of it. Leaving behind the wails of a painter who'd missed the deadline by a hair, the submitted works piled up into a tidy mountain.
Among the dozens of sketches gathered there, exactly one—
'Bingo.'
Unlike every other drawing in the pile, one picture depicted a beastfolk with a suspiciously pronounced bust, alluring and sensual to a fault.
And it was a fox beastfolk.