49. Our Magical Girl Is Open for Business
49. Our Magical Girl Is Open for Business
At last, we unveiled the episode crafted solely for Dina to the world.
For her, who had left people with nothing more than a bland impression, I invested considerable effort into building her narrative.
This was the result.
- Who dares condemn this pitiable girl as lacking individuality?!
The front of the club room was as noisy as ever.
A new political faction had emerged there.
Following the Mari Daisuki Party and the Prince Isis Party, a knight order devoted to Dina had been added.
Let me emphasize this.
'A knight order.'
I had no idea what about her appealed to the Knight Faculty's sensibilities, but the students banded together, shouted about chivalry, and formed a knight order.
Not every student in the knight order was from the Knight Faculty, but eighty percent were, and the remaining twenty percent also called themselves knights, so calling it a knight order was justifiable.
The Mari Party and the Isis Party went on alert against this new warlord faction that had suddenly appeared after the last broadcast.
Regardless, the Dina Warlords boldly voiced their opinions.
- Who could cast a stone at that girl who worked day and night to find her missing older brother?!
The lore revealed in the previous episode stirred a new resonance throughout the world.
The girl striving to find her missing older brother had the effect of tugging at the heartstrings of men and women of all ages.
So the puppy that squeezed in between the lion and the tiger turned out to be an admirable retriever?
People accepted Dina into the magical girl party.
Of course, the process wasn't without some noise.
- You’re telling me a group of eccentric inventors found with a ketchup launcher what a great trading company couldn’t find for decades? Where did all the plausibility go?
This criticism was something Nicol and I had anticipated.
But this time, the plausibility criticism was something we had braced ourselves for.
Nicol and I preferred pursuing a happy ending even at the cost of some plausibility, rather than a well-crafted bad ending.
What was the big deal about a ketchup launcher?
If sacrificing a little plausibility could put a smile on Dina's face, then that itself was plausibility.
Of course, their point was valid, so we humbly accepted the criticism.
Fortunately, it was at most a comment of disappointment rather than outright condemnation, so we quietly moved past this part.
Anyway, thanks to Dina's appearance, the front of the club room was bustling for the first time in a long while.
Discussion sessions were held for the first time since the Isis recruitment arc.
It was exactly like a marketplace out there.
Release the next episode!!
....
Yeah. I'd been waiting for this.
Eriri, now accustomed to being strung up, stared blankly while tied to the pole.
She didn't even bother looking for me anymore.
When I looked away from the protesters I'd grown strangely fond of, another faction was trying to rise while everyone was distracted.
This time, perhaps because Dina had appeared, they had added a slight variation.
Wakyapahyeongnongjjuuukkkkk
Crunch!
But thanks to raccoon beastfolk knights appearing from nowhere, snapping their jaws, and vanishing, their uprising ended without anyone ever finding out.
But no matter how much all of these people protested and rampaged, it was nothing compared to the existence now standing before my eyes.
While I was discussing the next story with Nikolai, the beings I feared most paid a visit to the studio.
"So, Allen. When do you plan to make the adventures of Lirpin and Cled?"
"For story reasons, it doesn't seem possible to send it as a regular broadcast. Instead, how about we make it for you as a side-story feature film?"
"Is a crystal collector's edition also possible?"
"We'll discuss it with the Magic Tower."
Since Nicol was beside me this time, he could finally understand why I feared them.
The suited man stood with two beastfolk escorts, glaring through sunken eyes. His obsession with his hobby was unmistakable.
I couldn't tell why he was this dead serious about his hobby, but only two things were certain.
One was that this human had money rotting in piles, and the other was that if we didn't grant his wish this time, I had no idea what he might do with all that money.
Nikolai also seemed to have sensed madness from that club president.
"Boss. What do we do?"
"What else? We make it, as always—a feature film starring Lirpin and Cled."
If we refused again, even I couldn't imagine the backlash.
Worst case, that man might just grab me and stuff me into a fursuit.
"Even though I was a super geek, I didn’t touch the furry side. Whenever I happened to see it, I only skimmed the surface."
"Nah, I think you'd know at least one?"
"I would?"
"You know. The animals' utopia."
"Ah."
Nicol repeatedly moistened his dry lips and immediately started working up an estimate.
Was it suitable for this feature film?
YES
Was it popular?
YES
Did I understand it well enough to direct?
YES
After deep deliberation, Nikolai spoke up.
"We won't get sued by a certain black mouse, will we?"
"Dunno. It'll work out somehow."
*
The planning office of Bon Voyage Studio.
"Haah...."
Inside that room made exclusively for Allen and Nikolai, the two men let out a sigh heavy enough to make the ground cave in.
At the forceful demand of those suspicious clubs, Bon Voyage Studio's next project had become an independent film for the magical-girl mascots, provisionally a theatrical release.
However, this fact itself wasn't a big problem for them.
They had already chosen a model to reference and sketched out the story, so all that remained was filming.
Unlike Magical Mari, it was supposed to be genuinely peaceful, so it would not be especially difficult to direct.
Thus, this feature film itself didn't even rank among their list of worries.
The problem was that while filming this feature film, they still had to keep filming Magical Mari.
The two film sets were physically in completely separate locations, whereas the Sage directing the films was only one person: Nikolai.
No matter how much of a veteran actor Allen was, filming while attending classes and shuttling between two sets was impossible.
And Nikolai was in the same boat.
Therefore, before creating the mascots' independent film, Bon Voyage Studio needed to resolve this contradiction somehow.
"What if we borrow Riv’s illusion magic?"
"How?"
"We replace either Magical Mari or the feature film with illusion magic."
"Why not skip hiring actors altogether and have the director and CG team make the whole film themselves?"
"It's no good, is it?"
"Of course it's no good."
Nikolai, who hadn't really expected much either, immediately dropped his head and sank back into thought.
There was a reason we only used illusion magic as a replacement for the CG team and background team.
In the end, illusion magic was also magic, so it could only create illusions that the wizard's brain could imagine and calculate.
That meant asking one illusion wizard to replace the actors, backgrounds, and props would burn out their brain before they created anything.
"We have no episodes in reserve..."
And unfortunately, because we had urgently added Dina's narrative recently, there wasn't even a backlog.
Originally, there had been a backlog of seven episodes filmed for a summer vacation event, but because we hastily added Dina's narrative, their place in the story timeline became ambiguous.
We decided to release those episodes as a side-story collector’s edition instead, but the important point was that we had no reserve.
In other words, we were filming under constant deadline pressure.
"Boss. What do we do?"
Nicol too had never experienced this kind of situation before, so he couldn't come up with a suitable solution.
Allen blocked Nicol's trembling, pleading gaze with a stack of papers and offered a solution in a flat voice.
"There are two options. One, we hire one more assistant director."
"Absolutely not."
"Thought so."
Why else had Allen recruited—kidnapped—Nikolai into the studio?
An understanding of genre and creativity did not spring from thin air.
Allen and Nikolai were the only people in this world who understood the magical-girl genre. Bringing in a native would be disastrous.
Forget sailing into the mountains—we'd be lucky if the ship didn't smash into a reef.
After half a year, Nikolai had become enough of an artist that he preferred overworking himself to ruining a carefully made project.
"Then option two. You write the scripts for me and direct the feature film. There’ll be more combat and less story than when you direct, but we’ll have to accept that. It may even come out cleaner overall."
Allen often devised the combat choreography, and Nikolai had learned enough from watching him to serve as action director.
But upon hearing this option, Nikolai's expression turned sullen.
"Why. What."
"You're saying you'll direct it by yourself, Boss?"
"Yeah. Got a problem?"
"Uh... I'm a bit uneasy."
"You doubting my skills?"
"That's not it... It's more that you might go too overboard."
"C'mon. The magical girl genre is all the same. Even if I go overboard, how far could I go?"
"Uh... Is that so?"
It was not so.
John Armstrong's concept relied on experience to compensate for an ordinary knight's physical abilities, so the character's ceiling was not especially high.
Magical girls, by comparison, could fly into the stratosphere and drive people straight into the ground.
The directorial ceiling was incomparable.
But at this moment, the desperate Nikolai's mind didn't have enough leeway to consider that.
"Then can you handle it, Boss?"
"Sure. I’ll still help outline the film and cast the actors. You can take sole charge on set."
"Thank you, Boss."
"No problem. It’s common for priests to substitute when a Sage is busy, so treat it as useful experience."
The conversation between the two ended on a heartwarming note.
But Nikolai didn't know.
He did not know how far Allen could go once Nikolai’s restraint and the conceptual limits of John Armstrong were removed.
He did not know what counted as normal to a man who had survived a world overrun by zombies and bombardment.
He did not know what madness a creator with ample money and total freedom could produce.
Nor did he know that all of it could arise not from malice or greed, but from well-intentioned passion.
Allen, smiling good-naturedly, and Nikolai, brightly smiling back, both embarked on crafting the feature-film scenario, unaware of what future awaited them.
As the saying went, the road to hell began with passion.