IWUAaDNW: Initiative 6.2

Karjn gathered her party––“This will be most enjoyable!” Raffaa declared loudly––and it took them about twenty minutes to prepare completely, during which time I did my own preparation.

It hadn’t taken too much of my attention to build a few dozen girders of reinforced wax, and spider web tarps were something I was constantly producing in my webweaver workshop, deep in the bug chutes. Actually building the things so they could be assembled outside of me had been a bit more of a challenge, but it had been an interesting one that I was pretty sure would come in handy later. Moving the assembly with ants and beetles, then assembling it with web strings wielded by a dozen spiders turned out to be pretty fun, like a puzzle game I’d made for myself.

My little construction project attracted a fair amount of attention, such that when Karjn returned in her full adventurer gear, there was quite a crowd gawking at it.

“…Are those stands?” Karjn asked me.

The construct, or rather constructs, were a set of stands, arrayed in two quarter-circles that took up most of my control circle. Reinforced wax supports, further reinforced by strategically placed ropes of dragline, all of it wrapped around a large tarp of non-sticky spider web to form a flight of seats. It wasn’t quite the Madison Square Garden, but considering the space I had to work with, I wasn’t half disappointed in myself.

“You’re turning this into a spectacle?” Karjn asked.

I was.

There was a rationalization; Ulfric was right when he said that most of my tricks worked because I surprised people. I only needed to fail at killing people once before all the tricks I tried on them lost that particular edge, and in my experience, failure was the norm in life-or-death battles. If everyone in the village knew what my tricks were, then I’d have a better idea of how effective my traps and tricks were going to be after that first run.

Not that the soldiers weren’t already gossiping about all of my latest tricks all the time; ‘Taylor watch’ was a common enough point on the scuttlebutt to have that name specifically.

But the real reason was that I felt like it. I’d been stressing out for a while at this point, building up, thinking up plans, sparring, fighting, all of it without ever resting due to being a Noctis cape… of sorts. And then the curse on top of that. I needed to unwind, and I could feel the villagers did, too. This felt like a good way to kill two birds with four adventurers.

So to speak.

As for the spectacle itself, well, today would be my villagers’ introduction to television. Or at least silent movies, since I didn’t really have a way to produce sound.

The crowd made an appreciative “Ooh” as sixty-eight luminous pixies, working in perfect coordination, created a view screen for their benefit. The upper corners were just at the edge of my pixies’ range, so they flickered every now and then, but I could solve that by having eight pixies working in pairs overlaying their illusions instead of just working with four.

“Oh, how marvelous!” Eira exclaimed when she arrived, followed closely by Raffaa and Ulfric, the latter of which gave one look at the screen and grunted in annoyance.

“She’s going to show everyone what we’re doing down there,” he grumped.