7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (10)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (10)
When I first crossed into this world, I struggled to face the troupe members directly.
Part of it was them being afraid of me — but in my own way, I was afraid of them, too.
It wasn't because of how they looked.
Unlike the locals, their appearances didn't register as particularly frightening to me.
Umon was a muscular, charismatic demon archetype straight out of a game or a film.
Sven might have been a symbol of terror for people in ages past, but in the modern day, skeletons have been so thoroughly commodified as imagery that watching one move around was just entertaining.
The conditions Yurakne, Trimery, and Bandik lived with reminded me of friends I'd had back at the orphanage, which made them feel familiar. Yobel the dwarf was simply a short person — the sort you'd see one of in every neighborhood.
What made them hard to face wasn't their appearance. It was what they'd done in the games.
Umon was a man-eating ogre who hung people on meat hooks and cooked them. Sven was a maniac who hunted people, skinned them, and wore their hides like clothes. Yurakne was a monster who targeted only men, bound them in cocoons, and squeezed the fluids out of them.
Monsters who might tear my throat out the moment I showed any weakness.
That was how I thought of them. I stayed on guard.
Those suspicions didn't last more than a few days.
I came to realize they shared only the outer appearance of the bosses from TT1. Inside, they were ordinary, deeply wounded people.
There was another group whose appearance took me a long time to get used to.
The Ratmen who worked as laborers for the circus.
True to their name, they were a race of beastmen with the appearance of rats.
To modern people, rats — alongside cockroaches — are the very symbol of filth and revulsion.
My own perception of them was no different from the average person's.
The first time I saw their bristly fur, twitching whiskers, flaring nostrils, and pink, wrinkled forepaws, a curse slipped out before I could stop it. If not for the Smiling Man, I might have recoiled on the spot the moment I laid eyes on them.
Yet the people of this world didn't find Ratmen nearly as disgusting as I did.
They might view them the way one views a somewhat slow-witted, unsanitary race of another color — but they didn't see them as monsters.
That struck me as bizarre.
A giant rat-human walking on two legs was treated as a person, while a human being with a disability was treated as a monster.
Emotionally, it didn't sit right — but it wasn't incomprehensible.
What makes something a monster, in the end, is a question of familiarity.
If a creature that couldn't possibly exist in reality — a dinosaur, a trilobite — actually appeared before us, we wouldn't call it a monster.
But a six-legged cat, a snake with arms, a cockroach the size of a human — those we would.
Grotesqueness that departs from the familiar.
The psychology that makes us recoil from something and label it a monster comes from that.
The difference in how the locals viewed my troupe members versus the Ratmen could be understood along similar lines.
Over two months, I'd grown reasonably accustomed to the Ratmen, too.
They no longer felt as repulsive as they once had.
And, to my surprise, they no longer feared me the way they used to.
Ratmen were a race born with an instinctive gift for reading the room and sensing the mood.
At some point, it seemed, they'd sensed on an animal level that I was no longer a dangerous presence.
Now they walked right past me without a second thought.
Once, they gathered beneath my bedroom balcony at dawn and sang songs while roasting sparrows they'd caught somewhere. Not long ago, one of them came to ask for money because his kid was sick and needed medicine — and I later found him sprawled out in a corner of the yard, high on cannabis.
Incidents like that left me so dumbfounded I'd laugh, but they also stung my pride a little.
Did they find me that much easier to push around than the old Wonderstein?
After pulling some of those stunts, I'd catch them rolling their eyes to gauge my expression, or twitching their whiskers to get a read on the atmosphere — the sort of thing you'd expect from a human being. It didn't escape my notice.
I started to think that the common prejudice calling them "a race with nothing but cunning and spite" might not be a prejudice at all.
Their behavior did grate on me.
I understood why Wonderstein had made a point of periodically summoning them to instill fear.
Show those smirking faces an opening, and they genuinely do start looking down on people.
But I couldn't do the same.
Now that relations with the troupe members had finally softened, I had no desire to step in and manufacture an atmosphere of dread all by myself.
Besides, I didn't need to. I had a capable Deputy Leader.
The easiest target for the Ratmen was the youngest, Umon.
Despite his ferocious appearance and the fearsome nickname "Red-Blood Ogre," his heart was gentle and soft to a fault.
The Ratmen had picked up on that perfectly and would provoke him — sneaking bites of his food, pretending to carry materials past him just so they could jab him in the calf and scurry off.
Umon, for his part, always let it slide with a laugh. It was nothing to him.
Ella didn't let it slide.
Whenever she caught a Ratman crossing the line, she came out with her whip.
Instantly, they'd hunch their necks and stoop their backs, putting on a show of cringing deference.
"Squeak-squeak! It hurts! It hurts! Human! Hitting makes us hurt and cry!"
"Babies cry too! Mama! Papa! Don't hit! We cry!"
"Squeak-squeak! Human world! So scary! Ratmen! So miserable!"
The Ratmen would shed fat tears with expressions of purest woe.
They wailed so piteously that Umon, the one who'd been picked on, would step in and try to stop Ella.
Their fake tears never worked on her, though.
Whenever they tried it, she just gave them that cold look and swung the whip anyway.
The first time I witnessed one of those scenes, I was so startled I screamed internally.
I'd never seen Ella be that vicious toward anyone but me.
Later, after experiencing their true nature firsthand, I silently gave her a thumbs-up every time she reached for that whip.
I also came to understand that she deliberately put on that cold, severe front — it was all for the educational effect.
Watching her handle them, I could clearly see why her job title was "Beast Tamer."
Thanks to her, the Ratmen followed Ella's orders obediently, and dealing with them was always her responsibility.
Today's hospitality training was no exception.
She summoned the Ratmen to the garden and taught them how to greet guests, serve food, and respond to requests.
Ella cleared her throat, folded her hands in front of her, and bowed politely.
"Welcome to the Wonderstein Circus!"
"Wonder-circus! Welcome!"
Ella demonstrated first, and the Ratmen repeated after her.
"What would you like to order?"
"Order! Say it!"
But even after watching for a while, the practice didn't seem to be making any real progress.
The Ratmen struggled to string words together into longer sentences.
"The exit is that way!"
"Go out! That way!"
Ella kept them at it for over thirty minutes.
Faced with their utter lack of improvement, she finally gave up.
"Forget it. Let's stop here."
At her words, the Ratmen straightened their bent backs and stood up as if they'd been waiting for exactly that.
"Good!"
"Deputy Leader! Demands! Too hard!"
"Our way! Easy!"
Ella shook her head, thoroughly fed up.
"Fine. Do whatever you want. It's not like the guests will expect much from Ratmen staff anyway."
The Ratmen let out triumphant squeals and poured out of the garden in a mass.
From the sound of their chatter, they were heading off to raid a beehive they'd discovered on the hill behind the hotel.
Honey was that delicious, apparently.
Ella watched their backs as they scurried off, shaking her head.
"Those crafty little bastards."
"Wasn't that asking a bit much of Ratmen?"
She sniffed dismissively at my question.
"They're slacking off on purpose. Their movements were a mess too, not just the speech. They know that if they set their minds to sabotaging this event, it'll fall apart — so they're not even trying."
"They calculate all of that and act accordingly?"
"Their heads work plenty fast. Underestimate them because of how they talk and you'll get bitten hard. Duty doesn't exist for them. They navigate by weighing benefit against balance. This time, they've decided this is the line."
Ella coiled her whip and fastened it at her waist.
It was supposedly a beast-taming whip, but the animals she handled were all small. I'd never actually seen her use it on anything except the Ratmen.
"Right. How did things go with Viscountess Bergson?"
"I wasn't able to speak with her. She left for another province early in the morning, I'm told. She's been quite busy lately dealing with the aftermath of the trial."
"Is that so? Then I suppose there's nothing urgent for us to do right now. We've got three weeks left anyway — no need to rush. Want to check on how the members' rehearsal is coming along?"
"Gladly."
A week ago, the idea of walking around to observe the troupe members' practice would have been unthinkable.
I'd always had to stay out of the way so they could be at ease.
But ever since the trial, they no longer seemed as uncomfortable sharing a space with me as they used to be.
"When I'm juggling the skulls, the weight difference between the other white balls and the skull keeps throwing off the rhythm. What should I do?"
"The trick is, whenever you toss a skull, you snap your wrist reflexively — "
The moment a member voiced a difficulty, Ella would produce a solution on the spot.
"You're telling me to keep applying rosin powder to my hands?"
"You can alternate arms, remember? While the audience is focused on the performance, they won't notice what your other hand is doing."
She had a sharp eye for each member's physical traits and gave advice tailored to them.
"Umon, your roar is most terrifying when you're scared. So when you're acting enraged, try thinking about something that frightens you."
"L-like this? Graaaugh!"
"...Nngh. Give it a beat before the roar. There, that's good!"
She was drawing on knowledge she could only have gained through careful, affectionate observation of each member.
Following her around, I couldn't help but marvel inwardly at her skill.
Maya was repainting the signboard at Ella's request.
Ella pointed to the space beside the central figure — the figure that was me.
"Move me over there."
Maya glanced sideways at her.
"Why all of a sudden?"
"I am the Deputy Leader, in name at least. I should be in the middle."
Maya shot Ella a disgruntled look — probably annoyed at having to rework a finished section of the painting — but she complied and adjusted the composition as requested.
And so the entire troupe threw themselves into their final rehearsals.
Day by day, stances were refined, movements adjusted, performances tweaked, the artwork revised — little by little.
Five days flew by.
<Wonderstein's Monster Circus>
Beneath the completed signboard,
Ella gathered all the members, turned to face them, and smiled with quiet confidence.
"Twenty-five percent."
The first week of the test had begun.