11. Wonderland (14)
11. Wonderland (14)
Tucked inside the Slagbort Confectionery Factory stood a small, three-story building whose purpose no casual glance could decipher. Small was a relative term — it only seemed diminutive next to the factory's sheer scale. Compared to ordinary houses, it still dwarfed them.
The structure had the air of another century. Its architecture was profoundly old-fashioned, and years of deferred maintenance had weathered its facade into something genuinely decrepit.
Surrounded by the factory's sleek, curvilinear towers, the building looked older than its true age.
Its failure to fit in wasn't limited to outward appearance. Its function — or lack thereof — and its placement were equally baffling. It served no operational purpose, yet occupied pride of place at the factory's very center.
No employee ever questioned its presence. They had no reason to. This was where the company had been born.
Back when the Duke was a mere confectioner, this building had been his shop. He eventually purchased the entire structure from its original street and had it transplanted here, wholesale.
Though old and worn, the interior remained immaculate. The staff saw to that, tending it on a regular schedule.
The rehearsals for The Five Acrobats were taking place inside.
The eleven acrobats the Duke had commissioned had been lodging and training here from the very first day, devoting themselves entirely to preparing the performance.
The Duke's private soldiers guarded the site around the clock and controlled all access. Stepping outside was forbidden. Until the Duke had seen the premiere, he wanted no detail, however small, to leak to the outside world.
There had been a few intrusion attempts.
Most never advanced beyond the planning stage. One, however, came close to succeeding. Several reporters had stolen factory work uniforms and walked in disguised as employees. They made off with a copy of the script that had been left unattended in the rehearsal room.
Fortunately, soldiers who found their behavior suspicious apprehended them before the material could slip out.
Public fascination with the "Illusory 13th" was explosive. Newspapers devoted a full page to the story every day.
The coverage leaned heavily on repetition, likely because no fresh facts had surfaced.
The articles speculated about the play's contents, questioned the script's authenticity, and denounced the Duke for hoarding what ought to be a cultural treasure belonging to all of humanity.
To their credit, the invited acrobats drew scant criticism. With no visibility into how things were progressing inside, there was little to take aim at.
That silence let the performers concentrate solely on readying the show.
Before proper rehearsals could begin, they first chose a director. No matter how brilliant the script or how skilled the actors, a performance without someone orchestrating the whole stage was bound to flounder.
"I'll take it. Any objections?"
Lord Fantastic nominated himself without a hint of shame.
No one argued. He possessed the capability. Whatever his personality flaws, no one here had more experience leading such a diverse collection of acrobats.
Like Christian's other works, The Five Acrobats incorporated several experimental elements.
First, the cast on stage numbered only six: the protagonist and the five acrobats.
All other characters were rendered through dolls, painted panels, shadows, and the like. Their forms were vague or exaggerated, and they had no spoken lines.
"Ah, I see."
"Court jester? Isn't that title far too grand for a little squirt like him?"
"Do you object to my proposal?"
Their exchanges with the principals were conveyed solely through the principals' lines. The audience inferred what the other party had said from the protagonist's reactions.
At first glance, this seemed an invitation to confusion, but Christian had crafted the dialogue with such wit that viewers instinctively sensed what had been said. Watching it during rehearsals drew involuntary admiration.
At the same time, certain passages were deliberately written with double meanings, tricking the audience's perceptions to provoke laughter.
Another peculiarity was the script's dynamic composition.
The five acrobats had no fixed characters. Each acrobat could be a claimant to the throne, an assassin, an ambitious schemer, the court jester's disciple, or the head of a slum household.
The picture the script painted shifted depending on which acrobat played which role.
For instance, in the scene where the "ambitious schemer" teaches the protagonist about the court's brutal realities, the stage direction read only: [Using Acrobatic No. 17, smash the dolls the protagonist admired as pretty.]
If the schemer was a strongman, they crushed the dolls with raw grip strength. A knife-throwing acrobat sent blades flying to sever every doll's head. A tamer had trained wolves to devour them whole. A ground acrobat trampled them flat underfoot. A tightrope walker balanced them atop a railing before sending them plunging off a cliff.
The acrobatics differed, but the line delivered remained the same:
—You'll end up just like them, poor clown. My smile isn't a smile. It's a sneer.
Each acrobat was assigned dozens of techniques. Some were elementary fundamentals, others demanding applications, and still others were original creations Christian himself had devised.
The performers had to commit every one to memory and follow the stage directions precisely.
Wonderstein thought it felt like an action game. Input a command, and each character executed their assigned flashy move.
Ella remarked that of all Christian's scripts, this one demanded the highest acrobatic mastery.
"Uuuh... this isn't easy. If they'd held a real audition, I never would've passed."
Karen was whining.
Her usual confident, unflappable demeanor made it hard to notice, but she was surprisingly sensitive to others' gazes. A single mistake, and she'd start stealing glances around her, deflated.
Whenever that happened, someone had to call Maya over to soothe her.
"You idiot."
"Th-thanks, Maya. For the encouragement... I'll work hard!"
And, bizarrely, Karen recovered her spirits. How that qualified as comfort remained a mystery.
Ruelo, whom everyone had worried was too young to endure such training, displayed an unexpectedly mature composure.
She never complained, no matter how grueling the task, and when she fumbled, she simply repeated the prescribed motion in silence.
"It's still easier than when the Milky Way hit me."
Those who heard her let out sympathetic sighs.
She had once been terminally ill. That history had taught her to face pain with equanimity.
Yet the same girl who met hardship with detachment burned with embarrassment whenever a scene demanded bubbly or energetic acting.
"I-I would've failed too, if they'd held an audition..."
"What nonsense! My daughter would've passed on looks alone!"
"S-stop it, Dad..."
The moments that embarrassed her most, naturally, were when Minova played the doting fool.
Despite sharing a background of terminal illness — of a sort — Clara reacted to hardship with endless theatrical groans. She was the eldest of the six actors, yet utterly failed to act her age. The instant practice grew even mildly strenuous, she let out a pained wail.
"I signed on specifically as a non-acrobatic member!"
The strange thing was that even while grumbling, she delivered whatever was asked.
Her portrayal of the protagonist — an acrobatic novice fumbling through his comrades' feats — was so vivid that Lord Fantastic himself marveled. And she executed every line exactly as the original demanded.
"Just what you'd expect from a Rekachev Top Graduate!"
"'Beginner mimicry' is notoriously the hardest thing to pull off... The detail of her skill subtly improving in the later acts is astonishing."
"I guess Clara's the type who only flips the switch once she's on stage."
People were awed by her ability. But there was more to the story.
First, she wasn't portraying a protagonist with clumsy skills — she genuinely was clumsy. In the early scenes, watching her partner's feats and trying to mimic them on the spot made her look authentically inept. Later, when the scenes shifted to solo demonstrations of techniques she'd memorized, she naturally looked a little better.
As for the lines, it would have been stranger if she'd gotten them wrong.
The script they were using was something she herself had spent months reconstructing, burning through vast quantities of sorcery materials to draw on a Demon God's Authority to its fullest.
She had excavated conversations from over a decade ago and recited them aloud while Phairen transcribed every word.
In effect, she was receiving acting coaching from the original author in person.
Unlike those three, each with their own quirks, Ella and Reina put on a flawless display.
Their acting drew the stares of the others mid-rehearsal — it was that striking.
Ella treated crude shapes of black paper as though they were wolves she'd raised with genuine affection. Reina delivered a one-woman duel against the shadow of a royal knight on a single-log bridge, making it feel like a genuine life-or-death struggle.
Yet even among the six, there was a weak link.
Someone who, unlike the other five, had never once stood on a stage: Maya.
Top graduate of a magic academy, she mastered difficult techniques effortlessly and committed every line and stage direction to memory at a glance.
The problem was her acting.
Even though she'd taken the role of the "assassin" — the one requiring the least emotional range — she struggled to express even that.
Her movements were stiff as a board, her voice flat and cold regardless of circumstance.
She threatened to shatter not just the audience's immersion but that of her fellow performers.
Finally, Lord Fantastic, unable to watch any longer, brought out a trump card.
"I'll use one of my Inspiras."
[Mime in the Mirror]
One of his four Inspiras: the ability to perfectly mimic an opponent's every movement, or compel an opponent to perfectly mimic his. When Maya stepped onto the stage, he would apply Mime in the Mirror to her and perform the acting himself. Arno, in turn, would conjure "phantom vocal cords" to reproduce her voice exactly.
"To be precise, it's our Deputy Leader's technique."
He muttered it like an excuse no one had asked for.
"Whoa, so that's the secret behind the 'Thousand Voices'? Maya, think you could pull it off?"
"If I study it."
And so, movement and voice were entrusted to the two men while Maya focused solely on acrobatics.
Many scenes in The Five Acrobats were one-person performances directed at silent targets. That made it easy to split time and rehearse independently.
The counterparts — shadows, dolls, panels — were all handled by Hobbs.
His training in Ground Acrobatics involved exercises wearing a doll mask, and perhaps thanks to that, he excelled at the role.
The painted plywood practically radiated emotion. At times, it even managed to communicate.
"......."
"You want me to bring water?"
The drawing on the board nodded.
The final role assignment was Minova taking charge of vocal coaching.
"What should I do?"
Simon answered with a smile, as if he'd been waiting for the question.
"There's one job. Not stage-related, but it's important. Helping everyone from behind."
The director assigned him to miscellaneous chores.
It was deliberate hazing, plain as day. Humiliating a man of troupe-leader stature by saddling him with menial labor.
"You, errand boy. Go mop the floor."
"Hey, didn't I tell you to move that load before breakfast?"
That sort of thing.
Ella protested fiercely, but Wonderstein accepted it with humility. With outside personnel barred from entry, someone had to handle the grunt work regardless.
Amusingly, the woman who had raised the loudest objections initially ended up working him the hardest later on.
"Boss, rub my shoulders!"
"Right away."
"Boss, let's get some air on the rooftop!"
"Sure, sure. Got it."
It didn't feel so bad.
He'd worked her far harder over the years.
More than anything, he could sense her intent: to save his dignity by signaling to everyone that this level of give-and-take was business as usual in their circus.
Everyone poured themselves into their roles.
On the tenth day, they were ready to show the Duke what they had.