(3rd Person POV)
The news took Eisen City by storm.
There was only one program on the broadcast — N.E.W.S. — and it didn't matter. People who had dismissed the television as a curiosity were now lining up to buy one, drawn by the simple, strangely addictive experience of watching two people sit behind a desk and tell them what was happening in the world.
Trade disruptions, weather predictions, city council decisions, crime reports — information that used to travel by word of mouth over days and weeks now arrived before dinner. Citizens who had never once thought about grain tariffs or road conditions found themselves discussing both at length, because someone on the screen had mentioned them that morning.
The device sold itself.
Hundreds queued outside the Hellfire Store within the first few days. Merchants, sensing opportunity, bought in bulk — some purchasing dozens at a time, already calculating the markup they could charge in cities where no one had seen such a thing.
They would be disappointed later. The broadcast signal only covered Eisen City. Beyond the city limits, the picture degraded into a blurred, unwatchable mess — a limitation Arthur hadn't advertised and the merchants hadn't thought to ask about. But for now, none of them knew that. They bought eagerly, convinced they were getting ahead of the market, and the sales figures swelled by another two hundred units on speculation alone.
---
While the television's success was becoming impossible to ignore, Arthur had a separate matter to attend to.
The nobles.
The group who held contracts with the theatres he had purchased from Delly — the same nobles who had marched into his office a while back with complaints and demands — had been watching the television's rise with sharpening interest. What had once been a grudging arrangement was beginning to look like the most lucrative partnership any of them had stumbled into.
Ellen arrived at the Eastern Theatre first. The others followed behind her — half a dozen nobles from the majority faction, dressed well and carrying expressions that landed somewhere between eager and carefully dignified.
"Lord Arthur." Ellen dipped her head — not deeply, but enough to signal that the hostility from their first meeting was well behind her. "We've had a month to sit with this arrangement of yours. The producer roles, the... television."
She said the word carefully, the way someone handles a tool they haven't quite learned the grip of.
"I'll be honest — I still don't fully understand all of it. But I understand enough." She glanced back at the nobles behind her. "Our names on those screens. People seeing them in their homes, every evening, across the entire city. That's not a theatre crest on a wall that a few hundred people walk past." She met his eyes again. "Whatever you need from us — funding, connections, public backing — you have it. We're in."
Arthur leaned back in his chair. He'd been expecting this visit for days. "You want a seat at the table?"
"We want a seat at the table," Ellen confirmed without hesitation.
One of the older nobles, a broad-faced lord with graying temples, stepped forward. "My family has invested in the performing arts for three generations. If this television is the future of that — and from what I've seen, it very well may be — then we intend to be part of it. Not standing on the outside watching."
Arthur's gaze moved across the group, scanning the faces. Friedrich wasn't among them. Neither were the three or four nobles who usually stood behind him.
"What about Friedrich and the rest of his circle?"
The room shifted. Ellen's expression cooled slightly.
"Friedrich and his circle have declined to attend," she said, choosing her words with visible care. "They remain... unconvinced."
"Unconvinced is a generous word for it," another noble muttered from the back.
Arthur smiled faintly. Friedrich's faction — still led by the man whose mana pathways Naruto had rattled — had refused to bend. The grudge ran deeper than business for him. But his holdouts were a shrinking minority now, and a handful of stubborn nobles weren't enough to cause real problems.
Delly's scheme to use the noble contracts as leverage against Arthur had not only failed — it had reversed entirely. The nobles he had counted on to be thorns were now lining up to be partners.
Arthur drove the point deeper.
"I have something else for you," he said, and the room quieted. "My company is premiering a second film. Leon: The Professional. It will screen first at the Eastern Theatre — one night only, before it opens to the public." He paused. "I'd like all of you to attend."
Ellen's eyes sharpened. "A second film?"
"The second film ever made," Arthur said simply.
The weight of that landed exactly the way he intended. The nobles exchanged glances — not uncertain ones this time, but hungry ones. The Wizard of Oz had reshaped their understanding of entertainment. The idea of seeing what came next, before anyone else in the world, appealed to something deeper than business sense.
"We'll be there," Ellen said, and no one behind her disagreed.
Arthur let the silence hold for a beat, then added: "One more thing. Princess Ilseveire has also accepted an invitation to the premiere."
The room went still.
Ellen blinked. The older noble straightened visibly. Even the ones who had been fidgeting went quiet.
The First Princess of Nordsturn — attending Arthur's premiere. That single detail reshaped the calculus for every person standing in the room.
"Well," Ellen said after a moment, a new note in her voice. "Then I suppose we'll need to dress appropriately."
Word traveled fast after that. Even Friedrich's faction heard about the guest list within the day. The man who had been the loudest voice against Arthur from the beginning found his objections losing their edges. Whatever personal grudge he nursed, the man he despised apparently kept company with the most powerful woman in the kingdom.
Some of Friedrich's nobles quietly sent word that they would attend after all.
Changing sides was starting to look less like surrender and more like good judgment.
---
Days passed. And on the thousand-odd television screens scattered across Eisen City, something changed.
The news broadcast paused — a scheduled break, the anchors explained — and a different segment took its place.
Faces appeared on screen. Noble faces, well-dressed and composed, seated alongside Arthur in what looked like a formal announcement. Ellen spoke first, introducing herself and the coalition of noble sponsors backing what she called "new programming" — funded content beyond the daily news, entertainment that would give viewers something else to watch.
The details were vague. The people watching had no real framework for what "programming" meant, or what form it might take.
But there was something in the delivery — the confidence of it, the polish, the fact that nobles were publicly attaching their names and reputations to this — that stirred a quiet anticipation.
If the news alone had been this compelling, what else could that screen carry?
Then came the real surprise.
An advertisement filled the screen. Moving images, music, a title card rendered in bold script:
Leon: The Professional — premiering at the Eastern Theatre.
A brief sequence of scenes followed — glimpses of Leonard and Elira, shadowed streets, the tension of something dangerous unfolding — cut together in a way that revealed nothing and promised everything.
It was over in moments. But those moments reached every television in the city simultaneously.
Within the hour, the entire population of Eisen City knew a second film existed.
The reaction was immediate. People who had watched The Wizard of Oz three, four, five times — who had loved it fiercely at first and grown weary of it over the months — suddenly had something new to talk about.
Conversations in taverns and market stalls shifted overnight. The excitement wasn't just about the film itself; it was the relief of something new, the promise that this strange invention called cinema wasn't a one-time wonder but a continuing thing, with more to come.
The anticipation built on itself, and it built fast.
---
Soon enough, the premiere arrived.
What surprised the crowd gathering outside the Eastern Theatre wasn't the event itself — it was the spectacle surrounding it. A long carpet, dyed deep crimson, had been rolled out from the theatre entrance to the street. Velvet ropes and wooden barricades lined both sides, holding back the growing mass of onlookers who had come to see what all the fuss was about.
Nobody in Eisen City had ever seen anything like it.
Actors arrived first, dressed in clothes finer than most of them had ever owned. Then the nobles, stepping out of carriages and pausing at the carpet's edge with expressions that ranged from curiosity to bewilderment. Cameramen stood at intervals along the route, and beside each one, a reporter holding a slim device — a microphone — waiting to speak with whoever passed.
Ellen stepped onto the carpet.
It was just fabric. She knew that. Dyed cloth laid over cobblestone. And yet something about walking across it — the crowd pressed against the barricades on either side, faces turned toward her, the strange devices pointed in her direction — stirred a feeling she couldn't quite name. A warmth in her chest. A straightening of her spine that had nothing to do with posture and everything to do with being seen.
She didn't fully understand it. But she understood she liked it.
The nobles walking beside her wore similar expressions — a mixture of unfamiliarity and quiet, reluctant pleasure. Even the older lords who had spent decades attending formal galas found this different somehow. More immediate. More public.
Then there were the reporters.
Friedrich had been walking stiffly down the carpet, chin raised, projecting the kind of rigid dignity that suggested he was tolerating the entire affair rather than enjoying it. That composure shattered the moment a young woman stepped into his path, thrust a microphone toward his face, and opened her mouth to speak.
"What is the meaning of this?" Friedrich recoiled, staring at the device as if she had pointed a weapon at him. "Why are you shoving that thing in my face?"
The reporter blinked at him. "My lord, please mind your expression. You are live right now."
"Live?" Friedrich's brow furrowed. "What do you mean, live?"
"It means people are watching you on their televisions at this very moment, my lord." The reporter gestured vaguely toward the camera behind her. "Everything you say and do right now is being seen across the city."
Friedrich's face went through three distinct phases in the span of a single second — confusion, comprehension, and something very close to horror. His eyes darted to the camera, then back to the reporter, then down at himself.
He straightened immediately. Smoothed the front of his coat. Adjusted his collar.
"I — yes. Of course." He cleared his throat, scrambling to reassemble his composure. "And what exactly is it you want from me?"
"Just a brief interview, my lord."
"A what?"
"A conversation," the reporter corrected herself smoothly. "A short talk. For the people watching at home."
Friedrich stared at her for a moment longer, visibly processing. Then he exhaled through his nose and gave a stiff nod. "Very well. Ask your questions."
He had no idea what he was agreeing to. But the alternative — looking foolish in front of the entire city — was considerably worse.
The other nobles fared little better. Most fumbled through their first encounter with a microphone, caught between their instinct to maintain decorum and their complete lack of experience with being addressed by someone who wasn't a servant or a peer. A few managed passable composure. Most did not.
The actors were a different story. Leonard and Elira had been briefed beforehand — Arthur had walked them through the format, the cameras, the questions they might face. Their co-stars had received the same preparation.
For people who had never done this before, they moved through it well. Leonard kept his answers short and composed. Elira, young as she was, smiled at the camera with a naturalness that made it look easy.
And then there was Ilseveire.
The princess stepped onto the red carpet and the crowd noise shifted — a ripple of recognition, murmured titles, a few gasps. The reporters straightened. The cameramen adjusted their angles.
Ilseveire smiled.
Not the thin, controlled smile she had shown Arthur in the principal's office. This one was warm. Open. The kind of smile that made the person looking at it feel as though they had been personally acknowledged.
The reporters, who had expected the famously composed and distant First Princess, exchanged surprised glances. She answered their questions with grace, paused for the cameras without being asked, and moved through the entire spectacle as though she had done it a hundred times before.
No one had coached her. No one had needed to.
Behind that smile, her thoughts ran on a separate track entirely.
'Every person watching this screen is forming an opinion of me right now. Not from a royal decree, not from a distant rumor — from my face, my voice, my manner. Whatever I show them tonight is what they will believe I am.'
She kept the warmth in her expression steady and natural.
'This city may only have a thousand televisions. But a thousand households is a thousand families. And first impressions, once set, are very difficult to change.'
This was not vanity. This was strategy. Ilseveire was campaigning — for hearts, for loyalty, for the kind of public goodwill that no noble title could manufacture on its own.
And she was doing it without anyone in the crowd realizing it.