7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (13)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (13)
The Silver Screen Circus's signature piece, the "Kinema," was a grand-scale illusion show that required dozens of mages.
The vast stage was blanketed with three-dimensional illusions packed densely together.
A false castle rose; behind it, artificial mountains jutted upward while an imagined river flowed. At the heart of a battlefield where fake cannons belched fire, a phantom order of knights charged toward illusory demons.
The sight of thousands of elaborate miniatures moving in synchronized, role-driven concert was a spectacle.
Blood and viscera had been omitted out of consideration for the audience, but the clash of combat—conveyed through bursts of gunpowder and plumes of dust—felt viscerally real.
Certain figures on the battlefield were periodically enlarged to advance the narrative.
A handsome young knight seemed to be the story's protagonist. He stood at the vanguard, leading the order with reckless courage.
"A real army doesn't move like that! Why is the commander at the front line...."
"Be quiet while we're watching!"
A retired officer grumbled, but a sharp rebuke from his wife swiftly silenced him.
The audience, who had never expected a large-scale war sequence from the very first act, were left speechless by the overwhelming scale of the illusions. The sound effects—the clashing of weapons, the roar of explosions—showed signs of being a touch over-dubbed, but that minor flaw was still more than enough to mesmerize the crowd.
The battle concluded with a victory for the human formation, a banner hoisted above the castle walls.
Once the opening war sequence ended, a victory parade and a castle ballroom scene followed, then a romance with the queen.
-My Queen, grant your blessing upon the path I walk.
-Very well. Come to me. I shall bestow upon you the greatest blessing in my power.
A sex scene, still a rarity in the theater of this era, was woven into the Kinema.
Conventional plays usually suggested intimacy between characters through silhouettes cast on a screen and the muffled sounds of sighs heard from behind it.
But the Kinema's scene was explicit compared to other performances.
The hero's bare body and the heroine's flesh-toned silhouette were graphically portrayed.
By Earth's pornographic standards, it was frustratingly tame, but it was more than risqué enough for the local audience. A handful of the more conservative patrons averted their eyes from the stage, but most savored the spectacle.
A few, driven to embarrassment, clutched at the person next to them and chattered loudly.
Yurakne was the prime example among Wonderstein's party.
"Oh my, oh dear. Oh dear."
She latched onto Wonderstein's arm, twisting her body this way and that as she slapped his shoulder with a rhythmic thump-thump-thump.
His tissue hardness was 4.0, equivalent to plate armor. Even if Yurakne had been swinging a club, he wouldn't have been injured, but that didn't mean the pain simply went away.
If he hadn't possessed the Trait: The Smiling Man, he might have been blinking back tears at the way she mercilessly wrenched his arm.
"Yurakne, please try to be a little more...."
"Eek! Ella! Maya! Cover your eyes!"
At this, Wonderstein did fleetingly wonder if this was inappropriate for the kids to see, but then Ella said, "They're not even real people, what's the problem," and he nodded.
The Kinema's illusions, focused on scale and dynamic motion, fell short when it came to finer details. This was especially noticeable in the close-ups of the characters' faces—it was like watching the CGI from a game released in the early to mid-2010s.
-And so, the young knight set out on his expedition west, the Queen's promise cradled in his heart.
Every line of dialogue, every monologue, and even the narration itself came from a single voice.
The Silver Screen Circus's Deputy Leader, nicknamed the Narrator.
The short, plump figure, draped in cloth, mimicked a whole cast of voices in sync with the shifting illusions, delivering the content of the spectacle with vivid realism.
Behind the stage, mages sat circled around several Memory Disks, generating the illusions.
Not even Arno could single-handedly sustain a full-stage dynamic illusion for hours on end. The mages took turns operating the Memory Disks, each assigned to handle backgrounds, props, characters, or effects.
The Silver Screen's Kinema shared a likeness with Earth's early cinema.
But it held one distinct advantage: 3D technology.
-GRAAAH!
"Aaagh!"
"Look at that!"
Several people pointed toward the second-floor balcony behind the stage and screamed.
There, a winged black dragon the size of a calf was gripping the railing with all four legs, rising from the darkness to glare down at the stage. The beast that had been lurking within the deep mountain range had revealed itself.
Vertically slit reptilian pupils fixed on the approaching party of heroes.
The great black dragon spread its wings and glided out over the audience seats. Shrieks and ragged gasps erupted from all around.
The dragon skimmed just above the crowd's heads.
Illusions carried no physical force.
But real flames wreathed the dragon's body, and their blistering heat licked across the tops of people's heads as it passed.
Among all the spectators startled by the dragon, no one was quite as vocally demonstrative as Yurakne.
"KYAAAH!"
She shrieked with a voice that outdid the dragon's own roar. She screamed until tears welled in her wide eyes, clinging tightly to Wonderstein as she shook violently.
"T-Troupe Leader! A dragon!"
"M-Miss Yura... please calm down. It's... it's only an illusion...."
"KYAAAH! It's coming this way!"
She made a grand theatrical fuss, pummeling Wonderstein's shoulders and back. The attention of the surrounding crowd was drawn squarely to them.
Beside them, Ella covered her face with her hands and hung her head. Even Maya, normally indifferent to others' stares, felt something akin to embarrassment, and Sven—who usually reveled in any kind of attention—suddenly felt a powerful urge to detach his own head and hide it under the seat.
What a spectacle of humiliation.
Ella muttered the thought internally.
Behind the stage, Arno allowed himself a faint smile.
As illusion shows had grown more sophisticated, an atmosphere had crept in demanding ever more decorum from the audience.
He disliked this trend. He was a man who had been active since the dawn of the circus era. He missed the days when conjuring something wondrous drew gasps and cheers, and summoning something terrifying sent the crowd into shrieking fits.
His gaze drifted from Yurakne, paused briefly on Maya, and then stopped on Wonderstein.
So the woman is with them as well.
He studied Maya's form.
A child who bore the simultaneous stamp of the woman he had once loved and the man who had been his rival.
He had received a letter from the girl's father and thought he should look after her....
And of all places, she had ended up there.
"Troupe Leader?"
A troupe member's voice roused him from his thoughts backstage.
He was responsible for mediating the collisions between the various illusions, and his momentary distraction had left the hero's party walking straight through a forest on stage.
"Forgive me."
He tore his eyes away from Maya and swiftly corrected the error.
-It seems the forest is under an enchantment.
-Snap out of it!
-If the leader loses focus, we all die!
Fortunately, the Deputy Leader improvised dialogue on the spot, ad-libbing a covering line that seamlessly patched the mistake.
He then cleared Wonderstein's group completely from his mind and devoted his full effort to realizing the performance.
The Kinema, much like the Escape King's magic act, concluded to resounding acclaim from the audience.
"That was actually good. I've never seen an illusion realized with that level of detail at this scale before."
Ella smiled, satisfied. Beside her, Yurakne stood with her arms crossed, tilting her head quizzically.
"But the reconnaissance angle feels like a bust. We came to see what strategies other troupes would use, right? And both just put on textbook-standard shows."
Sven's voice, with its rattling, snickering quality, spoke up beside them.
"Heh-heh, far from scouting their true strength, we only ended up revealing our own! Announcing to everyone around that our troupe has a coward capable of producing incredibly high-pitched screams."
"Ooooh...."
Yurakne's face flushed crimson as she ducked her head.
During the curtain call, the Silver Screen's Deputy Leader—who had served as the Narrator—had specifically called out her reactions from the Kinema show, giving the audience a hearty laugh at her expense.
Beside her, a smirking Wonderstein added a teasing comment.
"Heh heh, I quite agree with Mr. Sven. We even risked taking a direct personnel casualty. My arm was nearly broken, you see."
"Troupe Leader!"
Yurakne let out a shrill cry. He simply smiled at her once, then turned to address all of his troupe members.
"All the same, our scouting did yield one success."
Wonderstein pointed toward the Silver Screen's concession stand.
A line of audience members had formed there to buy the desserts the Silver Screen was selling. The number of people waiting was considerably larger than at the Pandora stand.
"That's impressive. Are people that hungry?"
"If they are, wouldn't it make more sense to buy a meal from Pandora? Why is everyone lining up like that just for dessert?"
Watching his troupe's reactions, Wonderstein gave a knowing smile and gestured to the menu painted on the stand's signboard. It bore pictures of lemon cheese cake and a sweet, sparkling water.
"Don't any of you find those desserts over there... alluring?"
"Lemon cheese cake? Never heard of it. Sweet honey soda water? Is something like that even tasty?"
"I've never seen it before either. But somehow it feels oddly familiar."
"What is this? I'm finding it strangely tempting...."
Hearing their responses, Wonderstein turned to look at Maya and spoke.
"Miss Maya, did you manage to record it properly in your sketchbook?"
"Yes."
Midway through the Kinema, Wonderstein had suddenly asked her to use the sketchbook to record the performance.
Maya's sketchbook possessed the power to automatically capture whatever she was looking at as a drawing. If the subject was moving, it would break the motion down into multiple frames, like a high-speed camera.
"But the sketchbook's page limit meant I could only capture about a minute's worth."
"That should be sufficient."
Wonderstein took Maya's sketchbook and turned the pages one by one. Perhaps because it was a magic tool, it was physically thin but could store a staggering thousand-plus drawings at once.
After scrutinizing the illustrations, he held the sketchbook out toward the group.
"Take a look at this."
The troupe members, who had been puzzled by their leader's actions, now studied the sketchbook's drawings closely.
Select scenes from the performance they had just watched were replicated in picture form.
"Is this that part where they were fighting the elite demons in the forest?"
"Wow, it really captured the images perfectly."
They were flipping through the drawings without much thought when their hands stopped midway.
There, they found a picture that had absolutely nothing to do with the show.
[Lemon Cheese Cake Is Delicious!]
White lettering on a black background. Everyone cocked their heads at the advertisement that had been jarringly spliced in.
"What is this?"
"Lemon cheese cake?"
"Was there a scene like this?"
"Maya, did you glance at something else during the show?"
"Not at all. I never once took my eyes off the performance."
Wonderstein encouraged them to keep paging through the sketchbook. The performance continued in the subsequent frames, but about ten or twenty pages later, another image resembling the first interrupted the flow.
[Drink Honey Soda!]
The members continued flipping pages. Over and over, slogans promoting the concession-stand food and goods sold by the Silver Screen Circus, paired with palpably realistic illusion-images of those products, were interleaved into the sequence.
Maya closed the sketchbook and stared hard at it.
"What is this?"
Wonderstein answered her with a gentle smile.
"A form of hypnotic suggestion. An illusion team was stationed to intercut these advertising phrases and images into the performance. In extremely brief flashes. At a speed too fast for a person to analyze and consciously register, 'This is what I am seeing.' But certainly slow enough to be read. At the borderline velocity between 'sensation' and 'cognition.' People's hands are naturally drawn to what feels familiar, aren't they? Over the two-hour runtime of this show, our minds were unconsciously exposed to these images and words thousands of times. And so, they've been branded into us. The positive promotion and imagery of the items sold at the Silver Screen's concession stand."