(3rd Person POV)
Weeks passed. In the eastern quarter of Eisen City, people were starting to notice the silence.
The Eastern Theatre used to put on a new play every three days without fail. But three weeks had come and gone without so much as a lantern lit above the entrance. No announcements. No posted schedules. Nothing.
Naturally, the rumours started filling the gap.
"Did you hear? Eastern Theatre's gone under. Old Lykan apparently has no choice but to close up and find a buyer."
"What a shame. My wife and I used to go there whenever the kids were home and we needed somewhere to... well. We can't afford an inn or a tavern, so that place was our spot."
"Honestly? It was only a matter of time. They've been running the same handful of stories for decades. Every person in Eisen City has seen every play they've got at least twice over."
The rumours spread quickly, as rumours do, and within days the whole city had heard some version of it: the Eastern Theatre was finished.
Plenty of people were sorry to hear it. But not everyone.
Master Delly, owner of the Western Theatre, sat behind his office desk and listened to his butler relay the news with the serene patience of a man receiving exactly what he'd been waiting for. By the time the butler finished, a slow grin had spread across his face.
"Finally," he said. "That stubborn old bastard. I offered Lykan a hundred and fifty gold for that property once, and he turned me down flat. But now?" He let out a low, satisfied laugh. "Now the value's considerably lower, wouldn't you say?"
"Shall I approach old Lykan with an offer, master?"
"No, no, no." Delly waved the suggestion away. "We don't swoop in now. We wait. We let him sweat. We let him get desperate enough to come to us — and when he does, we'll get that theatre for half of what I once offered."
He laughed again, the kind of laugh that filled a room unpleasantly. "It worked with the Southern Theatre. It worked with the Northern. Once I have the Eastern..." He pressed his fingertips together. "Every stage in Eisen City will be mine. One owner, one vision. And once I've consolidated them all, I'll gut the theatre model entirely — turn those buildings into something that actually makes money. Gambling halls, banquet venues, private event spaces for the nobility. Let the playwrights find somewhere else to beg for coin."
His butler stood with a neutral expression and said nothing.
Master Delly reached for his wine glass, already mid-celebration in his own mind, when the office door burst open and one of his younger subordinates came in at a near-run.
"Master — you need to see this!"
Delly's expression curdled. "You're interrupting me."
"It's about the Eastern Theatre, master." The boy held out a folded sheet. "They're not closed. They're back — and they're promoting something new. It's all over the east quarter."
Delly snatched the paper.
It was a printed promotional flyer, and in full colour at that — vivid enough to stop the eye. Bold lettering across the top read: THE WIZARD OF OZ. Below it, a line that made his jaw tighten: Coming to the Eastern Theatre — next week. An experience unlike anything this world has seen.
He stared at it for a long moment.
Then he crumpled it and dropped it on the desk.
"What is that old fool plotting now," he muttered, more to himself than anyone in the room. He drew a slow breath, steadied himself, and looked at the boy. "Go get me a ticket. Whatever it costs. I need to see this for myself."
"Yes, master!" The boy turned and hurried out.
Delly picked up his wine glass again, but the celebration had left the room entirely.
---
The bad rumours, as it turned out, had done Arthur a favour.
Three weeks of silence had primed the city's curiosity. So when the hired boys fanned out across Eisen with stacks of flyers, people took them willingly — curious, if nothing else, about what had become of the supposedly defunct theatre. The moment they read the flyer and realized it was promoting a brand new story, something no one had seen before, interest sharpened into something genuine.
Even the Adventurer's Guild wasn't immune to it.
"Wizard of Oz? Never heard of that one."
"First new story out of the Eastern Theatre in... I don't even know how long."
"I thought they were finished. Didn't someone say old Lykan was looking for buyers?"
"Apparently not. Hey — does this flyer say it's nothing the world has seen before? That's a bold claim."
"Bold or stupid, one of the two. Guess we'll find out."
...
At the Eastern Theatre itself, Lykan came nearly at a run.
His house sat a short distance from the building, so he had the slight indignity of receiving the news at the same time as everyone else — spotting one of the flyers in the street and having to read his own theatre's promotion like any ordinary passerby. He stared at it for a long moment, then tucked it under his arm and went straight to the theatre with a pace that belied his age.
He had spent three weeks in the dark. Weeks of mounting rumours and growing anxiety, with no word from Arthur and no idea what was being planned. Finding out through a printed flyer was not how he had imagined it, but right now he didn't much care.
He pushed through the backstage entrance and found Arthur, Leonard, and the rest of the crew already at work.
"Finally, you're all back!" He exhaled with visible relief. "I only just saw the flyer — same time as the rest of the city, apparently. Tell me you've actually finished whatever it was you were doing out there."
"We have," Arthur said.
Lykan looked around and noticed the workers moving through the space, shifting things, measuring, marking positions. His eyes drifted to the changes already taking shape. "And what exactly is happening to my theatre?"
Arthur explained it patiently: a projector required specific conditions to work properly — the screen placement, the sightlines from the seating, a few structural adjustments to the back wall and the way the room handled light. The changes were minor and entirely reversible. Nothing that would compromise the building itself.
Lykan considered this, walking the space with a slow, assessing eye. Structurally, the theatre was still his theatre. And beyond that — the contract was the contract. Arthur held ownership until he either proved the revival or forfeited the terms back to Lykan. Reasonable modifications were well within his right.
"Carry on, then," Lykan said, with the tone of a man granting permission he had decided not to withhold.
---
Two days later, the work was complete.
The screen hung white and smooth against the far wall, and the projector sat in its position at the rear of the house. When Arthur ran the film through it for the first time, the image bloomed across the screen in full colour, sharp and breathing and impossibly alive.
Word had gone around that the theatre was ready, and so they had gathered: Firfel, Apollonia, Keanu, Kaiser — all of them finding seats in the quiet house for this first private showing. They settled in without ceremony. Projectors were nothing new to them.
For Leonard, Lykan, Hazel, Ryze, and the rest of the troupe, it was another matter entirely.
The moment the image appeared on the screen — vast, luminous, people rendered at a scale that filled the eye — the room went perfectly silent. Then came the murmurs.
Lykan hadn't moved from his seat, but his neck was craned forward like a man trying to get closer without standing up. "But those are real people on there — I can see their faces. How did you put real people inside a wall?"
"We didn't," Arthur said. "We captured them. Everything you're seeing was filmed — recorded as it happened. What the projector does is throw that recording onto the screen."
Lykan opened his mouth, closed it, and looked back at the screen with the expression of a man who had accepted that he would not be fully understanding this tonight.
Their eyes had already returned to the screen, pulled there by something stronger than curiosity.
They watched Dorothy swept up in the tornado, the farmland spinning away beneath her.
"Is that a real tornado?" Lykan asked quietly.
"No," Leonard said, his voice still distracted with wonder. "I handled that myself — shaped wind and light with my magic during the shoot. It is entirely artificial."
"It felt real," Lykan murmured. "It looked real."
No one said much else after that. The film had them.
They sat through the whole thing without noticing the clock — through Dorothy's arrival in Oz, through the yellow brick road and the strange companions and the mounting danger and the long journey home. When the final image faded and the screen went white again, Lykan sat motionless for a moment.
Then he stood up.
"Unbelievable." His voice was hushed, still carrying the weight of what he'd just experienced. "I felt as though I was inside it. As though I was Dorothy, stepping through that strange world with her. I have spent my entire life in theatre, and I have never — never — felt anything like that."
Hazel pressed her hands together in her lap, her eyes still wet at the edges, saying nothing.
Even the troupe members who had been part of the production — who had stood on that farm and taken those directions and watched themselves reviewed on the television — sat in silence, as if seeing their own work for the first time.
From their seats, Arthur, Firfel, and the others exchanged quiet, amused looks. To them, it was a film. A good one, but a film.
To everyone else in the room, it was something that didn't have a name yet.