(3rd Person POV)
The following morning, in the inn's dining room, the so-called promising young man Kaiser and Keanu had been so eager to introduce turned out to be someone Arthur had already met.
And the recognition was mutual.
"Sir Arthur!"
"Leonard." Arthur said simply, lifting his coffee.
Kaiser and Keanu stared between the two of them. "You two already know each other!?"
"Yeah, we met yesterday." Arthur took a sip.
Leonard looked between the two men who had approached him the previous day with talk of exciting opportunities. "Sir Arthur is the one you guys wanted me to meet?"
"Hmm." Arthur nodded. "When did you meet these two?"
"I met them before going back to the theatre — before I even ran into you. They told me they had an exciting opportunity, something better than being part of any S-Rank party."
Kaiser cleared his throat. "This... well. Since you already know each other, things are considerably simpler to explain."
Between them, Kaiser and Keanu laid out their case — Leonard was capable, plainly and undeniably so, and the Six of Diamonds had been nothing short of foolish to let him go. A man carrying that many skills simultaneously, keeping a group functional without ever receiving credit for it, was exactly the kind of person Hellfire needed on the ground in this world.
Arthur listened and nodded. He could see the potential clearly enough.
What he hadn't anticipated was the particular shape of the whole thing.
He looked at Leonard, and something at the back of his mind stirred with a warm, almost nostalgic recognition. In his previous life, he had read enough manga, consumed enough anime and light novels to know this archetype by heart — the capable, indispensable man quietly holding everything together, dismissed without a second thought, only for those who dismissed him to eventually understand exactly what they had thrown away. It was practically its own genre.
He hadn't expected to meet one walking around in actual reality.
'An honest-to-goodness MC-type, right here in front of me.'
"Leonard." Arthur set his cup down and glanced at the document Leonard had placed on the table — a proper resume, prepared in advance, organized and thorough. "It seems you came with quite a record."
Leonard's ears went red. Whatever familiarity had developed between them the previous day, the man sitting across from him was a potential employer. The nerves had a logic to them.
"Right. You are hired." Arthur said simply.
Leonard blinked. "...Sigh, I suppose you probably need more time to—" He stopped dead. "Wait. Really? You just said 'hired'?"
"Yes." Arthur produced a blank sheet and began writing across it, the words forming cleanly under a small current of magic. He slid it across the table. "You will be handling the necessary work for the new project. These are your responsibilities."
Leonard picked it up and read.
"'Scouting for a possible filming location for Wizard of Oz — managing the budget of the film — responsible for organizing the education of the troupe for the rehearsals and filming—'" His expression shifted steadily from focus to bewilderment. "'Wizard of Oz'? 'Film'? 'Filming'? Are these made-up words? And what exactly am I scouting for — monsters?"
Rather than explain it in words, Arthur reached into his inventory and produced a compact camera. He knew a demonstration would do more than any amount of description.
He pointed it at Leonard.
Leonard's eyes went wide. "Wait, what is—"
Click. A flash of light.
"Wait, what!?" Leonard flinched, eyes squeezing shut, expression caught somewhere between alarm and total confusion.
"Have a look at this," Arthur said, and held the camera out.
"Hmm?" Leonard took it cautiously and turned it over in his hands until he found the screen. His own face stared back at him — eyes shut tight, caught mid-flinch, the picture of a man who had no idea what had just happened to him.
He didn't give his expression a second thought.
"Wh-what is this!? Is this me?"
"Yes," Arthur said. "That thing in your hand is called a camera. It can capture a single moment, or record an entire sequence of events that can be watched back afterwards."
"Such a magic item exists!?" Leonard looked up, genuinely staggered.
At the side of the table, Kaiser and Keanu both chuckled. Keanu's laugh carried something warmer than amusement — he remembered well enough his own first encounter with the technology of the modern world. The astonishment was identical.
"You see, with this camera, a performance can feel far more real than anything a stage can offer," Arthur said. "It is not fake in the way a stage play is fake — it is not framed by curtains with an audience watching from their seats. Imagine the troupe acting, but instead of playing to a crowd, they play before the camera. Everything they do gets captured as though it is truly happening. Because to the eye, it is."
Leonard lowered the camera slowly, still staring at the screen. He turned the idea over once, twice, and his eyes widened further with each pass.
He was not slow. He could already see it taking shape in his mind — what a story told that way would actually look and feel like.
"What do I need to do?" he asked, this time without a trace of uncertainty.
---
With Leonard's responsibilities settled, Arthur made his way to Reiner's office.
"Two hundred gold," Arthur said, taking a seat. "Seventy for the theatre purchase, and the remainder for the production budget."
Reiner stared at him. "You need that much simply to start a business here?"
"That is already the minimum," Arthur said honestly.
Reiner absorbed this, then his eyes sharpened with quiet interest. "I know something of your world, from what Saza has shared. Are you thinking of bringing it here — adapting it for this world?"
"A small part of it," Arthur said. With this world running entirely on magic and not a trace of electricity in sight, there was no path to computers or television sets. Not yet. "Just enough to begin."
Reiner drummed his fingers once on the desk. "Very well. I can extend the two hundred gold." He paused. "Though I would like to invest a hundred of it myself, if you are open to it. No pressure."
"I appreciate the offer," Arthur said. "But I am not taking investment at this stage."
Reiner sighed. "I see."
"When that changes, you will be the first I ask."
"That is good enough for me." Reiner pulled out a cheque, filled in the two hundred gold, and signed it with a practiced hand. He slid it across the desk. "Take this to the bank and they will release the funds." He folded his hands. "Do keep in mind that this is a loan, not a gift. The bank will attach an interest rate — nothing unreasonable, but it will be there."
Arthur took the paper, nodded once, and left.
The bank confirmed the cheque through a magic communication scroll — a brief exchange between the teller's manager and Reiner directly — before counting out the two hundred gold coins. Arthur pocketed them, settled the seventy owed to Lykan on his way back to the theatre, and felt the transaction close cleanly behind him.
By the time he returned to the backstage, Leonard already had the ten principal actors on their feet, scripts in hand, running lines for the Wizard of Oz.
Arthur watched for a moment, then raised his voice. "All right, everyone. Set that aside for now. Before any rehearsing happens, there is something you all need to understand first."
The room turned toward him — actors, crew, Lykan near the wall, all of them watching with varying degrees of curiosity.
Arthur reached into his inventory and began pulling out equipment.
Camera. Lighting rigs. Microphones. One piece after another, until the backstage had transformed into something that looked like nothing any of them had ever encountered. The space shrank around the equipment, the unfamiliar shapes and surfaces filling every corner.
Lykan stepped forward slowly, eyes moving across the assembled devices. "This is...?"
"Filming equipment," Arthur said simply. "And it is time for all of you to learn what that means."
Under the stunned gazes of Lykan, Hazel, Ryze, and the rest of the troupe, Arthur laid it out from the beginning.
It took hours.
He walked them through everything — what a camera captured and how, what filming meant in practice, why none of it would happen on a stage, what an audience would eventually be watching and how they would watch it. Lykan, for all his years in the theatre, sat with the expression of a man having the ground quietly shifted beneath him. This was not a refinement of what he knew. It was something else entirely.
But by the time Arthur finished, the room had changed.
The confusion had burned off and left something warmer in its place. They understood now why there would be no stage, no footlights, no rows of seats. The camera would remember everything for them. The audience would not be watching a performance — they would be watching something that looked, to every sense, like it had actually happened.
Hazel was the first to lean forward with genuine excitement in her eyes. Ryze followed. Then the rest of the troupe, one by one, until the backstage was buzzing with the particular energy of people who had just been shown a door they hadn't known existed.
Arthur let them run with it and turned the rehearsals over to Leonard.
The casting fell into place naturally enough. Hazel would carry the female lead — Dorothy. Ryze, with his lean build and precise movements, suited the Tin Man well. The older woman in the troupe, weathered and sharp-eyed, was a natural fit for the Wicked Witch. The remaining principal roles distributed themselves across the ten without much argument.
In parallel, Arthur sent Leonard out into the city and its surrounds to scout filming locations, briefing him thoroughly on what each scene would need. Leonard had spent years traveling outside the city walls with the Six of Diamonds, covering ground most people never saw. That experience, it turned out, was worth considerably more than the party had ever acknowledged.
Within two days, he returned with most of the principal locations already identified and documented.
Arthur looked over the list and was genuinely impressed.
Among the locations was a dungeon complex outside the city — dark, cavernous, the kind of place that swallowed light and gave it back wrong. Leonard had flagged it for the Wicked Witch's castle and the haunted passages leading to it. It was a better fit than anything Arthur could have scouted himself in the same time.
'Good eye,' Arthur thought.
Leonard was not the only one exceeding expectations. Hazel and Ryze had taken to the rehearsals with a focus that surprised even the more experienced members of the troupe.
The other eight were improving steadily as well — in no small part because Firfel had quietly stepped in as a coach, working with them in the afternoons with a patience and attentiveness that no one had asked of her.
What Arthur noticed, beyond the improvement, was how much time Firfel was spending specifically with Hazel.
He brought it up one evening when it was just the two of them.
"You are growing awfully close to that girl," he said.
Firfel glanced at him sidelong. "What? Jealous?"
"Hehe. Didn't think you swayed that way."
Her expression darkened and she kicked him — not hard, but with feeling. "It is not like that."
Arthur smiled. "Then is there a particular reason you are so attached to her? Genuinely asking."
Firfel was quiet for a moment. "I just... have a feeling," she said finally, with a small sigh. "Something draws me to her. Perhaps it is the love for acting we share." She shook her head slightly. "I am not entirely sure myself."
Arthur let it rest there. Whatever it was, he wasn't going to push it.