7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (24)
7. Trial of the Rose Windmill Cabaret (24)
Project-based circus troupes were typically assembled short-term, for a specific purpose.
This Circus Grand Prix, too, had its share of project-based circus troupes assembled by sponsors.
The Morning Star Circus was one of them.
After one look at their roster, Ella hadn't thought much of them.
Sure, they'd gathered a handful of reputable acrobats, but that was about it.
They had none of the distinct identity of groups like Pandora, the Silver Screen, Papael, Mango, or even her own troupe.
She'd pegged their performance ceiling at a middling fifty-percent range, at best.
Thirty minutes into their show, she was revising that estimate upward.
It wasn't that their individual skills outstripped the common consensus. Most of their performers fell somewhere between first- and second-rate.
Nor did the program hold any particular surprises.
They worked methodically through the traditional five disciplines: Strength Show-off, tightrope walking, Ground Acrobatics, animal taming, and marksmanship.
Just as she'd anticipated, it was a general store stocking one of every acrobatic category.
But the emcee steering the ship was something else entirely.
Rooster Minova.
He'd earned a modest name for himself as a singer and strongman.
Yet his real gift lay elsewhere.
His manner was coarse, his tongue often rude, but the man could command a stage. He excelled at unpacking each acrobat's feat, mining it for comedy, and selling that joke to the crowd.
And he wasn't alone up there—he had a co-host to soften his rough edges.
His own daughter, Ruelo, who also served as the troupe's Deputy Leader.
"A-and next, our two tightrope artists will... perform on the flying trapeze..."
The sight of an adorable girl in a baby-chick costume shyly fumbling through her lines coaxed warm smiles from the audience.
The show was so absorbing that an hour slipped by before anyone realized.
"We'll see you all next time!"
The Morning Star acrobats took the stage together for their final bows.
Ella clicked her tongue softly.
'A hosting duo, huh...'
Her mind drifted back to their own performance that morning.
The members had managed decently enough.
If you excluded Bandik and Yobel, that is.
Despite Ella's explicit warning the night before, the pair had gotten riotously drunk and were still nursing hangovers come morning. Sure enough, they'd botched it on stage.
Bandik had tripped over his own bandages, ending up tangled and flailing around in a slapstick mess as the wrappings came undone. Yobel had simply vomited, copiously, all over the stage.
When Bandik stumbled, Ella's heart had seized up.
His act had been the very first in the lineup.
If the first performer imploded, the shockwave could rattle everyone who followed.
Luckily, Wonderstein had held them together from the emcee's spot.
No matter what disaster unfolded in front of him, his composure never cracked. He never let the chaos—or the mortification—of one moment spill into the next.
At times like these, his inhuman detachment was a blessing.
That smile, fixed and unflappable as a doll's.
Fellow circus folk marveled at his supreme self-control, but Ella knew better: it wasn't an act. It was simply what he was.
Watching the show, she'd felt an itch she couldn't scratch.
She wanted to be up there.
She didn't have the stamina to serve as the lead emcee, but she was more than capable as a supporting host.
The real question: would he accept her proposal?
As she rose from her seat, Ella assigned the Morning Star Circus a final score.
Fifty-seven percent.
On par with their own numbers, but that alone wouldn't decide the contest.
The real battle would be won or lost on the strength of their merchandise.
Ella stepped out of the hall.
In the midway between Hall 2 and Hall 3, the two troupes' concession stands sat side by side.
True to its nature as a project-based circus troupe, the Morning Star Circus had recruited specialists for every role. Professional chefs prepared their food. Since many of them had acrobatic backgrounds, they delivered not just cuisine, but performance—a spectacle that drew the eye.
Meatballs pinwheeled through the air in a juggling act; pizza dough spun on fingertips like plates on sticks; flames erupted from a pan and shot toward the ceiling in a theatrical plume. The cooking itself was a show.
Beside them, the Monster Circus stand looked pathetic.
No flashy sights. No mouthwatering aromas.
The stand was run entirely by Ratman workers.
Their skills capped out well short of impressive cuisine.
That naturally limited their sales strategy. They'd narrowed their focus to the one thing Charlotia's palate embraced and the budget allowed: tomato dishes. Cheap raw ingredients, universally liked.
Tomato spaghetti, tomato juice, tomato canapés, and the like.
The sort of fare you could find in even the most backwater village in Charlotia.
The contrast between the two booths couldn't have been starker.
Ella, however, wasn't discouraged.
The food at their stand was never meant to be the main event. It was just window dressing.
Their real draw was something else entirely.
"Whoa! A Legendary outfit! The tuxedo!"
A shout yanked every nearby gaze toward a single point.
A man was holding up a card for all to see, its orange ink displaying the word "Tuxedo."
"Aren't there only a handful of Legendary outfits for each type?"
"Ah, you're kidding! I pulled five draws and only got one Rare!"
"Lucky bastard."
The man who'd drawn the Legendary card surveyed the crowd with a smug grin, making a deliberate show of tucking the card into the breast pocket of his jacket.
"Right, I'll be back in a bit!"
He waved to his companions and disappeared through the rear door of Hall 3.
Inside the practice room beyond, six curtained booths stood waiting, each marked with the nickname of a monster troupe member.
After a moment's deliberation, the man walked up to the booth labeled Red-Blood Ogre.
That guy had left the strongest impression.
And of all the cast, he was the best at striking dramatic poses for a portrait.
When he emerged a short while later, he was carrying a large illustration. It depicted Red-Blood Ogre in a tuxedo, poised mid-lunge as if about to devour someone, while the man himself stood just in front, face frozen in a theatrical scream.
This was Wonderstein's brainchild.
A chance to have your portrait drawn alongside the monster performers.
He'd cribbed the idea from theme parks—those spots where you pose with mascot characters and get a printout on the spot.
The problem was, cameras in this era took forever to develop and produced shoddy quality, hardly souvenir-worthy. But they did have something with comparable functionality to a modern camera.
Maya's sketchbook.
The reward for reaching Affection level 15 with Maya, this artifact could reproduce any scene in her field of vision onto its pages with perfect fidelity. It was, in effect, a magical camera.
That didn't mean they were going to start tearing pages out of the sketchbook, of course. You didn't waste a precious magic tool like that.
Instead, Maya would look at the sketchbook's rendering, then recreate the image by hand onto a fresh sheet of drawing paper right beside her.
Her telekinesis atomized the paint into a fine mist and laid it down onto the blank page with the precision of a printer. It was a feat that demanded the ability to manipulate fluids at an exceedingly microscopic level.
Even when he'd first proposed the idea, Wonderstein had wondered if he was asking too much.
Less than three weeks until the showdown, and he was demanding printer-grade fluid control.
Genius or not, Maya would struggle.
"Miss Maya, don't push yourself beyond reason. A plain oil-painting quality would be more than sufficient."
"No. I can do it."
In Maya's mind, she owed him a debt a lifetime couldn't repay.
And yet he'd said two and a half years of service would cover it. If that was the timeframe, she wasn't about to show anything less than utter dedication.
Microscopic telekinetic manipulation.
You could set this as a magic academy graduation thesis and it would still be overkill.
Could she pull it off in under three weeks?
She had her own doubts.
But she was also one of the most brilliant prodigies that institution had ever produced. Days before the competition, she achieved a level of fluid control that rivaled a color printer.
The moment she rendered that first painting with her telekinesis, another truth clicked into place.
She had finally gained the ability to imbue her illusions with physical force.
Traditional Illusion Magic, rooted in the Image, required a technique of infusing illusions with intense willpower to give them substance.
But Maya's method built an illusion's surface out of polygonal structures. She didn't need willpower. She only needed to coat the polyhedron's surfaces with her telekinetic force, like applying a layer of paint.
And now that she could manipulate paint at the particle level, that had become possible.
Her respect for Wonderstein deepened yet again.
Even while managing the entire troupe, he was constantly thinking of ways to help her grow.
Ella thought Wonderstein's idea was a solid one.
Since a troupe member did the labor, the only material costs were paper and paint. No raw-ingredient headaches.
The real puzzle was the pricing.
Slap too high a price tag on it, and you'd scare off all the small-timers with only a hundred or two hundred coins to their name. Set it too low, and you'd struggle to extract decent profits from the VIPs carrying thousands of coins. This wasn't the kind of item one person would buy twenty or a hundred copies of just because it was cheap.
So Wonderstein cooked up another scheme.
He leveraged the power of his Costume Room.
He created a costume catalog and assigned each outfit a different price.
Big spenders with deep pockets could get their portraits done with members decked out in premium attire of their choice—Red-Blood Ogre in blood-red plate armor, the Black Widow Spider Woman, the Court Jester Skeleton, and other Legendary or Epic looks. The less fortunate, meanwhile, had to settle for the troupe in their base costumes.
Those with means wanted services that set them apart from the lower tiers. Savoring the envious glances of others, they happily bought pricey costume cards at the concession stand.
Wonderstein's commercial instincts didn't stop there.
He also made sure to extend a "chance" to spectators with lighter purses.
Right beside the concession stand, he installed a random draw system.
He sorted the costume cards exactly as the catalog laid out—Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary—and assigned appropriate odds. People drew them from a box like a lottery.
Wonderstein knew full well just how much money a gacha system with character skins could rake in.
Unwanted costume cards could be traded for food at the stand, which lowered any psychological resistance. Once they'd filled their bellies on Monster Circus cooking and had no appetite left for the Morning Star's fare, they funneled whatever coins remained into one more draw rather than a competitor's meal.
The fact that his group's food was "easily found anywhere" also meant it had broad, universal appeal. People happily swapped their Common and Rare cards for Monster Circus tomato dishes without complaint. And since tomatoes cost next to nothing in raw materials, the strategy barely dented their margins.
With that, they'd managed to edge out the Morning Star Circus in opening-day revenue, despite the overwhelming quality gap between the two concession stands.
Watching all of this play out in person, Ella found it nearly impossible to stay on the sidelines.
A contest decided by circus performance!
The acrobat's blood in her veins was running hot.
"Let me onstage, too!"
"I believe I mentioned I would be serving as emcee."
Ella stared straight at Wonderstein, clad in his clown makeup.
He'd never officially named that look, but in her mind she'd christened it "the Joker."
"I know. And I know I'm not fit to be the lead host, so at least let me stand up there as a supporting emcee."
"A supporting role? It isn't in the script."
"I've already worked out the gags. All you need to do is learn a few reaction beats. I'll handle the rest."
"Hm. Still, I'm concerned about your health, Miss Ella..."
"I swear I won't overdo it."
Those earnest, shining eyes stared into his own. Wonderstein let out a quiet laugh.
Utterly, hopelessly addicted to the circus.
"All right. But what about your costume? The butler put away your tailcoat, and you've made it clear you won't wear anything I've made."
"If you're dressed as a clown, then I'll dress as a clown too."
She pulled her own outfit from a bag.
A jester's cap with two prongs jutting out, and a clown costume patterned in alternating wedges of red and black.
Ella wanted to jump into the very next performance. So the two of them took the stage without a single rehearsal. Even if it only amounted to a few extra lines, stepping in front of an audience with zero coordination was a serious gamble.
And yet, oddly enough, she didn't feel the slightest worry about the situation.
Neither, it seemed, did Wonderstein.
Maybe that confidence was the secret.
The Joker and the Clown.
Their performance had the easy synchrony of a duo that had traded banter for years, without a beat out of place.
Ella threaded in well-timed quips and reactions to match Wonderstein's bizarre antics, while Wonderstein rolled with her sudden ad-libs without ever breaking stride, adjusting the pace of the show without a flinch.
And so, in both performance and merchandise, they waged a fierce back-and-forth against the Morning Star Circus through Friday. By the week's end, the two were dead even in total sales.
Then came Saturday.
The day of the final showdown.