11. Wonderland (5)
11. Wonderland (5)
I wrapped up my work earlier than expected and spent the extra time walking through the city.
Everywhere I looked, preparations for Halloween were in full swing.
Municipal workers were fitting pumpkin-shaped ornaments over the gas lamps and arranging enormous bat and spider models beneath them.
Something about them struck me as familiar the moment I noticed it. The outfits.
The laborers doing the heavy lifting wore coveralls printed with bone patterns and skull-shaped hard hats, while the senior officials supervising the work had pulled on red leather demon masks with horns.
They reminded me of our troupe's clown and youngest acrobat.
Between the scale of the installations and the costumes on the officials, the city had clearly been bracing for this day in earnest.
With tourists already flooding in thanks to the Circus Grand Prix, the city seemed intent on using the festival to leave a lasting impression.
I strolled the streets, taking in the scene.
Tril Trillo 2.
Its spatial setting was the cities that housed the Six Great Theaters, and its temporal setting was the Halloween festival four years from now. At last, the city was starting to look like the place I knew.
Absorbed in the sights, I walked straight past the spot where I was supposed to meet Clara and ended up at the market's performance yard.
Solo acts and small acrobatic troupes had staked out their patches, showing off their skills. Laughter and gasps of wonder erupted here and there.
I slipped in among the spectators to watch.
Some faces were familiar: two men in identical formal suits putting on a comedy act.
"There's a snake in my shoe!"
"Don't let it get away! We've gone three days without eating!"
"But it's terrifying! How do we catch it?"
"Let's boil it—shoe and all!"
But before they could so much as drop the shoe into a pot, the snake shot out of it. The shoe was so worn that a hole had opened at the toes. They scrambled away from the snake, tripping, sprawling, launching into a full slapstick routine.
The timing between the snake and the two men was exquisite. That had to be the work of the snake trainer who traveled with them.
Chuckles rippled through the crowd. A few burst into belly laughs.
Their skills had improved dramatically since Rouge. The acting, certainly—but more than that, the script had become far more natural. Watching Allen spout endless, unhinged nonsense while trembling in terror at a single snake, and watching Joe deliver clumsy deadpan rebuttals, was absurd beyond words.
In the original story, they debuted as actors and spent nearly three years without earning so much as a single round of applause. Yet here, on a modest stage, they were getting a genuinely warm response.
My every small choice was rewriting the future in unseen places, indifferent to whether the cause was trivial or weighty.
Allen and Joe wrapped up their act successfully. I smiled, watching them bow deeply in every direction as the acclaim washed over them.
For someone who would one day leave this place, these little changes were welcome. They made me feel I wasn't just racing along the rails of some quest, but leaving something behind here after all.
The next stage I sought out was a solo tightrope walker's performance. Except, astonishingly, she wasn't walking on a rope—she was walking on the edge of an enormous straw cutter's blade.
"Is that blade real? No way... a fake?"
"It's real! Just a minute ago it sliced clean through a thick radish!"
"How is she even standing on that? Barefoot, no less?"
The crowd buzzed.
It was remarkable. The acrobat wasn't just gripping the edge with her toes as she walked—she pressed her soles flat against it and stood upright. Not a drop of blood ran from her feet.
She performed in silence, without a single word, without even the standard self-introduction. A mask covered her face, making her entirely unidentifiable. Her build barely gave away that she was a woman.
She moved between three razor-sharp blades in turn, pulling off one precarious feat after another. Everyone watched with clenched fists. When she executed a full flip and landed back on the edge, applause burst from every direction.
No mistakes, even in this chaotic environment. She was no amateur.
That was when our eyes met.
"Oh?"
It happened the moment she touched down after her second flip. Her foot slipped on the blade. Her body plummeted toward the ground. Red blood gushed, soaking the edge.
"Aagh!"
"S-someone's dead!"
"Waaah!"
Spectators screamed and recoiled. They'd be embarrassed soon enough.
The acrobat was perfectly alive. Only her cheek had been nicked—and even that cut wasn't deep. Some blood, yes, but nothing life-threatening. One onlooker had simply panicked and overreacted.
While everyone else was still glancing around awkwardly, I was already moving toward her.
The masked acrobat hadn't so much as cried out despite the injury. Only once I stood right in front of her did I catch the faint sound of a pained breath.
"May I take a look at the wound?"
She exhaled roughly and gave a small nod.
The moment my hand touched her cheek, she let out a soft, stifled sound. Wherever my fingers brushed, the bleeding stopped and new skin swelled to close the cut.
"What is that, a potion?"
"No way. A single bottle of top-grade potion would set you back several tons of coal."
"Is this still part of the act?"
Amid the murmuring, I lowered my voice so only she could hear.
"That was dangerous. You could have been badly hurt... Miss Reina."
At my words, the masked figure flinched. She shook her head rapidly.
"Y-you've mistaken me for someone else."
Her effort to force her voice into a gruff rasp was almost endearing. I activated the Sound Room.
-You're a terrible liar.
-......
She had no answer to that.
I helped her up and guided her to a quiet corner of the yard. A few onlookers trailed after us, but when we simply sat down to rest, they soon wandered off to other performances.
We sat there in silence.
It had been a while since I'd seen her. Lately, no Member Quests had come from her. She hadn't asked to talk, hadn't asked to meet secretly in an alleyway, hadn't asked me to play the part of her father.
Since the Freshmen Welcome Party, she'd seemed reluctant to be in contact with me.
After a long stretch of silence, she spoke first.
"I'm sorry."
I shook my head, smiling.
"You should be saying 'thank you,' shouldn't you? You haven't done anything wrong to me, Miss Reina."
She looked at me for a moment, then nodded.
"...yes. Thank you."
She let out a long breath and began speaking in a more relaxed voice—telling me how she'd been.
I shared my own recent news in turn. In the space of a few minutes, we caught each other up on two weeks.
"When I feel stifled, I cover my face and come out to perform alone like this. If I practice inside, my father always finds something to criticize."
"I see. But doing dangerous acts like this alone is reckless. You need someone beside you to help."
Neither of us brought up why she'd been out of touch.
The blood on the straw cutter was nearly dry when a roar went up from the far end of the market. Some kind of competition involving the townspeople seemed to be happening there.
Reina said she should get going and rose to her feet. She was still wearing the bloodied mask that had been slashed by the blade.
"Are you planning to walk around in that?"
"People will just assume it's a Halloween costume."
"Still, walking around with real blood on you is a bit much. Wait here a moment."
As luck would have it, there was a street stall nearby selling masks. I walked over and picked one out.
In TT2, every protagonist and support character had a Halloween costume. Among the dozens of masks the shop sold, hers happened to be there.
I bought it and handed it to her.
"If showing your face feels like too much pressure, wear this instead."
It was a chilling mask. The two horns on either side of the forehead were common enough on other masks, but the expression was somehow deeply unsettling.
Depending on how you looked at it, the face seemed to be weeping—or raging. The wide-open eyes and the gaping mouth lined with sharp fangs looked as though it might be spilling grief-stricken lamentation, or maybe letting out a furious howl.
"The mask of La Llorona—the Weeping Woman."
"The Weeping Woman?"
I hadn't known it had a specific name. Players just called it the "Reina Halloween mask."
She accepted the mask I held out.
"It's a legend from the Castille region. Haven't you heard it?"
She told me the story attached to the mask. It was about a brother and sister.
As I listened quietly, I realized I'd heard the tale before. A conversation with Yurakne at the hotel in Rouge came back to me. Back then, we'd shared the contents of magazines we'd read over tea, and a similar story had come up.
-So the twin siblings are separated by the Milky Way and only get to meet once a year, on their birthday.
It was about a brother and sister who had become stars. I'd remarked at the time that it reminded me of the story of Gyeonu and Jiknyeo...
When I mentioned that, Reina nodded.
"Yes, that's right. It's the legend connected to those stars. The twin stars have several names. The one I mentioned is one of them. That name is 'the Weeping Woman,' and in that pairing, the other side is called... the Smiling Man—El Reidor."
The Smiling Man.
I turned and scanned the mask stall, wondering if they might have the male counterpart's mask too.
Reina corrected my expectation.
"You won't find it there. That one's mostly used for comedy."
When I looked back at her, she was already wearing the mask I'd given her.
The Weeping Woman.
Knowing the story behind it, the mask looked more sorrowful than frightening.
"Wait just a moment."
She hurried over to the mask stall, bought a mask, and came back.
"I bought one too. This one's for you, Troupe Leader."
It was a crow-shaped mask. I knew what it was.
"The mask of Saint Victor. The one who heals the sick... Doesn't it suit you, somehow?"
She hoisted her equipment onto her shoulders and left. The people she passed recoiled in fright.
Walking around with a bloodstained straw cutter and a La Llorona mask was, admittedly, terrifying.
I tucked the mask into my coat and stood up. It was time to go meet Clara.
That was when I saw people surging toward one side of the street—toward the spot where that competition was supposedly taking place.
"What happened?"
"Some monster of a kid showed up in the first match. The table they were using for a base got pulverized, and the opponent went flying into the corner!"
"What? Wait—a kid? How old?"
Something had clearly gone down. I followed the crowd toward the commotion.
The competition, or whatever it was, seemed to have been suspended. The emcee, the other participants, the spectators—everyone was staring at one spot, murmuring.
"Waaah!"
There, clutching her broken arm and sobbing, was Clara.