Chapter 308 – Princess of… Architecture?

“A game, people, WE – WILL – HAVE – A – GAAAAAAAAAMEEEE!” Jeff shouted, rising from his seat as he raised on fist in the air. A rather dangerous manoeuvre while on a flying desk, and sure enough, he stumbled and fell off. “Wow, wow, wow, I am getting so hyped I am losing the ground under my feet!” he continued to talk into his microphone while barely holding onto the edge of the platform.

Dra took a sip of his beverage before moving in to help his co-host.

“You owe me 10 bucks, Jane,” John, who had bet on this happening, told his girlfriend. She sighed, and Lydia sent both of them annoyed glances.

“Don’t start pissing out of your eyes, anal queen,” Thana laughed. “This works out in our favour, does it not?”

“I suppose… although it depends on what the game is,” Lydia begrudgingly admitted.

“So, Magoi Magus, would you do the honours!”

“Most certainly,” John heard the familiar voice of the high Fateweaver, muffled through his raptor skull mask, echo through the Colosseum. The magical screens above showed him putting his top hat straight, and then his walking stick clacked once on the floor.

The sand of the arena below rippled in response, casting waves and then becoming a grassy plain. Magoi’s stick hit the floor a few more times; each time something appeared in the arena. Wood of different colours, metals, magical lights and other stuff that looked dangerously like it would be used in the construction of something. All of it appeared twice, at the centre of the two halves of the arena.

In the meanwhile, the commentators explained what was going on. “Today, our teams will square off in a rousing contest of… building houses!” Jeff tried to make it as exciting as possible.

“Not exactly houses,” Dra corrected. “Asking the teams to just build a house would take a long time. Instead, they are going to put a façade on a template of their choosing. The winner is whoever builds what the judges find more pleasing.”

“Aaaaaaaaand here are our judges!” Jeff added after the, in his opinion, boring part was over; “Number 1, the greatest Fateweaver of them all: Gehnigm!”

“I will judge as I want,” the distinctly Chinese voice answered.

“Number 2, the current king of Germany, Frederikus Rex, Frederik the Great!”

“I find yo-“ the old king started but then began coughing into whatever microphone he currently held; “Sorry, your use of title disturbing. Anyhow, here is hoping that my granddaughter can actually produce something worth looking at.”

“Last but by no means least, which I truly and absolutely mean because he can’t be the least of anything because he is the first, the Apex, the great emperor himself, Romulus!” Jeff got the last announcement done.

“I demand that what you build be aesthetically pleasing,” Romulus stated. “Few things annoy me more than badly designed buildings. This game is worth one point.” Now that was an unexpected side to the emperor. Then again, he probably made the blueprints for all of Rome himself, so there was somewhat of an architect inside him.

Thinking more on it, John realized that designing a city that had been standing for at least three thousand years by himself made him the most experienced architect in history. His glare into the camera, unwavering and unnerving, was also a clear statement that he was not joking.

‘You never know the hobbies people have,’ John thought as both teams stepped on their respective elevators. At a flick of the emperor’s fingers, the battleground was separated into the two halves again. The same Elementium wall that had been used for the mirror match game, although the crystal had been removed and its socket been left empty.

Above the wall, an illusionary mirror appeared that prevented anyone from peeking over the barrier. Romulus really didn’t want them to spy on each other’s works.

John redirected his attention to the building materials. It was insane what Fateweavers could do inside Illusion Barriers given time. They were basically gods in their spaces, with the drawback of not being particularly great at doing battle. Remaking the landscape didn’t help much if that was your only weapon, especially as that ability wasn’t on the fast side. There had to be more downsides that John just wasn’t aware of though.

“The time allocated for each team is 1 hour,” Dra’s voice was slowly fading. “During that time, the contestants can neither hear our commentary nor see what the other team is up to.”

“Let’s go, fo-“ Jeff’s last shout became just white noise and then vanished completely.

“Okay, let’s build a giant fucking tower of as much shit as we can slap together!” Thana said and grabbed a steel beam, lifting it with one hand as if it was a stick at the side of the road.

“Are ya stupid? We should build something nice and fuzzy!” Rave went against that blood mage and went over to the piles of cloth. “John, can ya give me a hand in making this pinker somehow?”

“I can’t… because we clearly should build a castle!” John declared. “I am thinking Lydia’s airport thing. Oldschool yet modern.” He turned over to the princess who was passing by Nia, blankly staring ahead like usual, and going towards Thana.

She slapped the blood mage on the wrist, who only gave an irritated glance in response. Pain was a highly ineffective punishment here. “Drop it!” Lydia then verbally demanded. “Just once, you pack of chaotic plebeians, you shall follow my command.”

It wasn’t a request. Lydia was whirling around a whip, that she had formed from her rapier, while assuming a highly militaristic tone. For the purpose of this exercise, she seemed to have dropped all friendly feelings she had for her team and went back to the stuck-up princess she had been before. While that didn’t sound exactly pleasant, John had to admit that it was the best way to go about things.

“Hey, can ya pull that stick out of yo-” Rave didn’t come to another conclusion, namely that she really didn’t like that tone. However, she was stopped by Lydia throwing a steel beam at her. Rave went cat ears and caught it. Unlike Thana, she didn’t have an easy time keeping the thing in the air, but she still could do it without the threat of falling under the weight.

“You will obey my orders for the duration of this exercise. I will not be shamed in front of my grandfather, and much less will I lose a point because of your perpetual complaints about your individuality. This is war, your freedoms are secured for peace,” Lydia’s little speech had the intended effect, and the two troublemakers of their group, Thana and Rave, accepted that they had to do as commanded for once.

“Typical German mindset, collective first, individual later, preferably the next fucking generation,” Thana couldn’t keep herself from taking at least a little jab. Lydia was able to ignore that much. Her assuming command came with at least a reasonable degree of freedom.

“We will need a foundation; a simple tower of stacked stone blocks will suffice. Remember, only the facade is important, so the means by which we stabilize the construction on the inside is non-reflective on the final rating,” the princess started ordering everyone around, drawing lines in the ground by bending part of a steel beam into a plough.

For every area she left instructions on what should be placed there and who should do it. Of course, Thana did most of the heavy lifting, and John was pretty much delegated to doing next to nothing, only carrying smaller blocks or lighter materials. He did provide a workforce for the cutting and carrying in the form of his elementals though.

Eventually, they stood in front of a middle-sized tower. Although tower made it sound more impressive than it was. In reality, it was a properly stable stack of blocks with a pyramid on top, almost exclusively stone.

“Good,” Lydia seemed pleased with the result, at least; “Onto the details. First off, I will need you to meld together the blocks, can you do that, Gnome?”

“S-sure, if John gives me the mana th-“ the stone elemental gave a hasty surprise and then yelped when she bit her tongue.

“…then she is sure she can do it,” John finished the sentence for her and sent Undine over to stop the pain.

Afterwards, Gnome gave a series of shamed little nods, that became self-assuring nods, that became fist-shaking and mutters of “You can do this!”, that became a deep blushing as Salamander made her aware of the fact that she was talking to herself. All that while she went over to the tower and did as asked.

Now they had an even-surfaced tower. “Can you make the top slanted instead of stepped?” Lydia asked of Gnome. It was done, and now they had an obelisk. Progress, but still not exactly a great building.

That was when Lydia gestured for all of them to gather. The ferforitum of her household weapon became a 3D-model in the air, and John finally realized the strategy here. The building in front of him was beautiful, a modernistic styled tower with a slanted ceiling that was made out of many individual arches built on top of each other.

Windows were aesthetically arranged to wonderfully align with the unique way the outer walls were set up, as each side had three rounded segments that ended in the arched parts of the ceiling. The entrance was inside a dent at the foot of one of the corners. In colours, it largely kept to white and silver, with the occasional black or gold frame.

The thing actually looked like it would have been better off as a skyscraper, but it would work at their current size as a very elaborate corner building. John looked from the model over to the stack of blocks they had.

“All we have to do is carve it down, paint it, put in glasses and all that,” he noted and checked his clock. “And all of that in 45 minutes. Well then, let’s go at it.”

“I will paint all the frames, the best frames, all the frames, the best frames, I will frame them. With the mightiest frames they shall be doored!” Sylph chirped when she was assigned painting duty together with Salamander.

Gnome continued the melding process, which cut down the work for Siena, who carved out the areas where windows should be with her fingernails. Thana and Rave put said windows in, Nia helped wherever she wasn’t in the way (she had no particular skills that helped here). John himself just coordinated his elementals.

Undine turned out to be pretty good at painting: she just covered herself in paint and then flowed over whatever surface needed colouring. She did, however, comment that it made her feel sick and it tasted like bleach, so she much rather only did it when it was absolutely needed. That wish was granted by Lydia, so they only used her for extremely big or very detailed surfaces.

The princess herself was not without work either, putting metal where it belonged and urging everyone on to continue working for the whole duration of the game. Good thing as well, the time was nearly up when she walked around their creation to point out any final flaws.

“I must compliment you all,” she said as she was almost done; “You have fulfilled your individual roles perfectl- Why is there a cat drawn on that window?” It was a rather good depiction, not perfect but certainly at an artistic level of skill, of a white cat with black head and paws, one of which it licked.

Everyone looked at Nia. “It is cute,” the blank said like that justified everything.

“It doesn’t match the theme!” Lydia spoke in a stern tone. “Take it down immediately, we don’t have a lot of time left!”

“And that’s the end of our contestants’ time!” Jeff shouted.

Lydia closed her eyes and took a deep breath, “Curses be upon you, Murphy.” Then she just gave Nia one last, poisonous glance with her steel eyes.

“Let’s mix things up and start with team 2,” the hyped announcer spoke into his microphone;

“Supreme Fateweaver, what do you think of this building?”

The sound of a microphone getting picked up, and then a voice that was too close for comfort answered. “It’s okay.” The microphone was put back down.

“What a ringing endorsement,” Dra drily commented, sipping his ginger ale. “Well, what does the current king of Germany have to say?”

“A wonderful display of the art deco style,” the old and dying voice seemed reinvigorated as he spoke about art. “Modernistic, truly marvellous use of arches, I don’t quite like the door placement, but that cat in the window really brings the look together, makes it seem lively.”

Nia’s whole upper body slowly turned, John imagined he could hear an old metal construct squeaking along as she did, and she emptily stared at Lydia. “…It seems my judgement has been misguided,” the princess averted her gaze nervously. That was a first, apparently even Lydia could not completely resist the weirdness that Nia radiated. Either that or she had a guilty conscience. Or both.

“Indeed, a good one. I am especially impressed by the fact that the princess of steel managed to get her team together,” Romulus said. John thought he must have misheard for a second, the emperor had offered a compliment.

“Now, Maximillian on the other hand,” a snap of the emperor’s fingers and the sight-hindering illusion fell aside.

Behind, they could see not one building but several unfinished ones. It seemed Maximilian and Alexej had started a completely oversized palace that they couldn’t possibly have gotten done in an hour, especially not with only gravity powers at their disposal. While Mario had been helping with that idea, his style was distinctly Roman, which went not that well with the former two having been building more of an enlightenment period palace.

Then Nariko had come along and slapped a traditional Japanese wing onto it, also not finished. The camera revealed a copy of a clearly western, romance era painting in there, which had the usual ‘out of place’ feeling that Nariko and her ‘husband’ seemed to connect over.

The only thing that was done in that whole mess was a statue of a naked gobliness, fingering her own cunt with one hand while making an alluring gesture with the other. At the base of which Ankleshanker stood, cleaning his fingernails.

“This is a disgrace,” Romulus thundered; John could practically hear a crack appearing in Maximillian’s ego.

“I have nothing to add,” the voice of Frederik had reverted to his old, decrepit state.

The shrill sound of a microphone getting mishandled, followed by “It is NOT okay,” made the supreme Fateweaver’s opinion clear as well.

And so the game was decided in Lydia’s favour.