11. Wonderland (32)
11. Wonderland (32)
Wonderland was a place that felt like a 24-hour festival no matter where you went—the inn district being the sole exception. Here, the streetlamps dimmed automatically at a set hour, and all noise was blocked out for the sake of the guests.
Which meant any sound filtering in from outside signaled the arrival of morning. The clamor spilling through the window roused me awake.
But no matter how many times I blinked, the world stayed pitch black. Something was covering my eyes.
"Mwehehe... Master, not there... hweeh..."
The moment I let out a breath, Clara mumbled in her sleep. I realized it was her foot pressing down on my face. I carefully moved it aside and sat up.
When we'd gone to sleep, she'd been on the opposite side of the bed. At some point, she'd rotated ninety degrees and stretched her legs toward me.
Her sleeping habits last night had been spectacular. She'd suddenly shriek at the top of her lungs, and at one point she'd even kicked me in the shoulder.
Where her other clothes had gone, I had no idea—she was down to a T-shirt and nothing but panties underneath. Her shirt had ridden up enough to bare half her chest, and she was scratching her stomach. I couldn't believe this was the same model student who'd represented the enrolled students at the entrance exam.
It was too awkward to keep watching, so I hurried to leave the room. But something yanked me back.
Pointed ears and shimmering skin were easy to make out even in the dark. Rumi had her arms locked tight around my waist.
Last night, I'd tried to sleep alone in the living room. But Clara had insisted on sleeping with me, and Rumi had joined on the pretext of keeping watch to make sure I didn't lay a hand on her body. So the three of us had ended up sharing a bed.
—Cross this line and you're dead!
I hadn't expected the one making that threat to be the one clinging to me.
I barely managed to peel her off and lay her back on the bed. She'd been gripping so tightly that my straw-body torso was crushed and misshapen. When I straightened my back, my whole frame felt like it was listing about two degrees off-center. The shoulder Clara had kicked let out a creaking noise somewhere inside.
I vowed that today, no matter what, I was sleeping alone in the living room, and stepped out.
The dim glow of the streetlights filtered into the living room. Wonderland's lighting always held this early-evening hue. Probably because it was the ideal hour for getting drunk on revelry.
The moment I walked out, I spotted someone else lying in the spot I'd marked for tonight's bed.
"Miss Elphi?"
Ella was already half-awake, gazing at me through drowsy, half-lidded eyes.
"Hey... mister. Good morning... yawn. Though, as you can see, it's not exactly morning sky yet."
"Did something happen? Why are you sleeping out here?"
"Nah, I just had a nightmare in the middle of the night... Figured I'd wander the living room and ended up lying down here."
At the word nightmare, I spotted dried tear tracks on her cheek. I remembered that she used to have frequent episodes because of her memories.
She hadn't been able to take Gaston's medicine here either—the one she was supposed to take every day. She looked at my face and let out a little laugh.
"What's with that look? Oh, you think I had a nightmare about what we saw at the Judicial Theater? Don't worry, it's not that. Just... something bad from the past came back to me."
I could see her trying hard to act bright. I pretended not to notice as she wiped the tear stains with a handkerchief.
"Ughhh! The sofa really is uncomfortable. But you didn't sleep well either, right, mister? Clara's sleeping habits are seriously awful."
"Tell me about it. Tonight, whatever happens, I'm sleeping out here—wait! Now that I think about it, did you push Miss Clara onto us in the first place because you didn't want to share a bed with her?"
"Eheh, busted."
Ella playfully stuck out her tongue.
Not long after, Rumi emerged from the room—she demanded to know whether I'd touched her body, and I was so dumbfounded I couldn't find words—and then Ruelo and Clara woke up and came out in turn.
We ate breakfast and headed out to the central plaza. Raising our Fame even a little would improve the operation's odds of success.
But after hours of circling the stages, no cancellation tickets appeared. By lunchtime, we'd half given up on finding any and were simply watching the performances unfolding onstage.
"These stages feel different from the ones we performed on."
The heart of the central plaza. There, five stages stood back-to-back, each facing a different direction.
"Vocals, bass, guitar, piano, drums. The five winners from each category earn the honor of performing Apostle Strauss's ensemble piece together."
I read the banner erected near the stages. Ella let out a whistle.
"So the conductor Strauss was an Apostle of Kirkeus too. He lived about a hundred years ago..."
These five stages drew the biggest crowds of any competition in the plaza. Getting tickets for the next season required waiting at least ten days. At that level, cancellation tickets were rare, and the competitors vying for them were numerous. We moved on to look for other tickets.
But even after scouring the plaza all afternoon, no cancellation tickets turned up. Yesterday had apparently been an extraordinary stroke of luck.
"Nothing we can do. We'll have to make do with what's available. Let's go get dinner."
On the way back to our lodgings, we passed through the plaza's center again.
The five stages were still in full swing. The competitors performed simultaneously in matching sequence slots, so whenever the music began, the sounds from all five stages blended into an ensemble-like flow. Of course, the skill gaps between participants usually meant one side's sound quickly overwhelmed the others, or the competitive energy threw the timing off entirely.
We had just cleared the plaza and were about to enter the inn district when I heard a familiar instrument from far away. It was the one I'd heard three days ago at dawn, on an empty stage where The Five Acrobats had been rehearsing. The instrument Reina had played.
Was it called a banjo? No way...
"Hurry up! What are you staring at?"
At Rumi's urging, I quickly shook my head. Instrumental performances were everywhere—I'd probably heard a banjo dozens of times just walking around. The sound had only hit me so hard because they were amplifying a single instrument over there.
"Onward! My steed!"
Rumi hopped up onto my back. She'd clung to me all night too—apparently this straw body was absurdly comfortable.
"Mister, me too, me too!"
Ella climbed onto the other side. Then Clara came rushing at me as well.
"Master, me too, me too!"
It wasn't that I couldn't carry her too, but after last night, the sight of her trying to hitch a comfortable ride on me felt irritating for some reason.
"Miss Clara, why don't you carry Miss Ruelo instead?"
"No fair!"
Clara protested, but she went along with it readily enough. She gave Ruelo a piggyback ride and started walking on all fours.
"...You don't have to walk on all fours, you know."
"Fine!"
And so we wrapped up our second day in Wonderland and returned to our lodgings.
***
Not long after they departed, the ensemble on the five stages came to an end.
But none of the performers who'd taken part stepped down from their stages. The audience and the judges—and even the next wave of waiting performers—had all completely forgotten their turns were coming.
Every gaze was fixed on a single point.
The bass guitar stage.
Standing there was a woman in a golden cape and suit, wearing a white horned mask that looked furious, grief-stricken, and chilling all at once.
In the five-stage ensemble, it was common for one stage to overpower the others. The ones that usually drew attention were vocals, guitar, and piano. Drums tended to get overshadowed by those three, but sheer noise and showmanship usually let them hold their own.
The bass guitar, on the other hand, was always on the receiving end. Its low register made it too easy for the other instruments to drown it out.
The performance just now had started no differently than usual. The drums set the beat; vocals, guitar, and piano caught fire, riding the rhythm and surging ahead. The bass guitar slipped along behind them, a faint, colorless current—barely there, barely noticeable.
Like the rounds before it, the cohesion shattered quickly. Tempo, pitch, phrasing—everyone chased their own style.
The crowd and the judges alike grimaced at the cacophony bleeding in from the other stages, struggling to focus on the one in front of them. And the ones who suffered the most, naturally, were the bass guitar judges.
"Why did the Apostle Council design the stages this way?"
"Exactly. If they wanted this, they should've put everyone on the same stage! This is neither competition nor collaboration."
No matter how hard they tried, properly evaluating a bass performance amid all that noise was nearly impossible.
The judges were busy settling on another set of safe, middling scores when something shifted. The chaotic, scattered performances began slowly converging into a single current.
"What?"
"What's going on?"
At first, everyone voiced confusion at the strange phenomenon. But it didn't take long to grasp where the change had originated.
The bass guitar stage.
The woman playing the banjo drew the drums in first. The soft, compassionate resonance her instrument emitted was so alluring that the drummer—lost in his own frenzied beating—found himself seized by an unconscious urge to synchronize his breathing with hers.
Once those two instruments, which provided the ensemble's backdrop, struck harmony, the remaining three stages were pulled in as if by a current. Vocals, guitar, and piano—each had seemed so impressive when fending for themselves. But when the bass and drums wove a duet together and began shaping that harmony, the three stages that couldn't blend in suddenly felt like actors delivering solos isolated from the rest of the cast.
And so the five stages rode a single thread, playing on as one.
Then, at last, the moment all five unleashed their final note in unison—a wave burst forth and swept through the plaza. The people standing right in front of the stages felt, in their very bones, what the metaphor of a trembling soul truly meant.
Those who had been utterly immersed could sense, within the storm of dazzling, colorful rhythm, a single guiding thread of wind. It flowed unmistakably from the bass stage.
"We have the highest-scoring bass stage performance of the season!"
At the emcee's cry, the crowd chanted her name and the name of her instrument.
"The Weeping Woman! The Weeping Woman!"
"Banjo! Banjo! Banjo!"
The bassist left the thunderous encore calls behind her, gathered her instrument, and descended from the stage. Theater officials rushed at her from all sides, thrusting admission tickets toward her—easily dozens of times the crowd that had swarmed Ella.
She hadn't expected to draw such an ecstatic response. She didn't consider herself vastly superior to the other performers in technical terms. She simply hadn't grasped the power carried by the resonance of the living.
Whatever the reason, it allowed her to accomplish what she'd set out to do. She meticulously reviewed the invitations she'd received. Among them was a theater with an opening three days from now.
She chose that one.
Back at her lodgings, she cast off her stage makeup and went to wash up.
A stage costume modeled after her father's attire. An instrument that was her mother's keepsake. And a mask gifted to her by someone she cared for.
Reina didn't enjoy performing, but today's stage had been genuinely satisfying.
'Father, please wait. I will save you, no matter what.'
She steeled herself with that vow and sank into the warm bath. The exhaustion of days spent stranded in an unfamiliar place—desperately fleeing, desperately scheming—seemed to wash clean away.