The next day was the start of the founding festival, and it began with a bang. I wasn’t there, but the event was supposed to be kicked off by the king giving a speech at some place overlooking the central plaza. The conclusion of the speech was punctuated by fireworks. Lots of them. Enough that for a moment I wondered if there was a terrorist attack or something.

I wanted to continue working on house, but the festive mood of the city distracted me. Also, there wasn’t much I could do right now anyway, and with how busy the city was, I didn’t feel like dealing with the traffic to reenter the city after visiting somewhere to collect resources for construction.

So I stuck around and played.

While I could have done so in my usual form, I decided to enjoy the festival like a child, and transformed myself into an eight year old girl, before exiting the building via the front door. I’d installed the thing just so I wouldn’t have to go around the back in my disguise. It was also why I’d missed the speech, since I’d forgotten to put it in the night before.

My transformation this time was rather plain. Usually I liked to have an interesting hair color, like red or silver, but this time I went with a boring brown, matching the vast majority of the population’s hair coloring. My eyes were the same, a boring brown. My facial features were so average, one would have a hard time describing me without it applying to hundreds of people in the area.

This form was one I typically used for information gathering, since unless I was in an extremely dangerous area where its not safe for children, I tend to not get a second glance. Most people barely give me more than one quick look, and that’s usually just to make sure they aren’t going to run into me or something.

This time I was going to use it to have some fun.

Most of the game booths weren’t allowing adventurers to play, since their skills made many of them strong or skilled enough to win easily, and also reveal the ways they’re cheating so make money off of the poor saps they sucker into playing their games.

But in order to become an adventurer, one must be at least ten years old.

My current body was small, slightly smaller than an average eight year old, making it seem like there’s no way I was an adventurer.

With a big smile on my face I set out to conquer the gaming booths and claim the interesting prizes as my own! I didn’t always go for the top prize, since sometimes the lower ones were something I wanted more than the top one. Like one booth were the top prize was a ‘dragon’ scale, though it was actually not even from a wyvern, while one of the lesser prizes was a beautifully painted hand fan. I didn’t need the thing, nor was it likely to be very expensive, but it looked pretty, so I took the fan as my prize.

I went all over, playing games and winning prizes, while also enjoying the atmosphere and sampling foods from across the land. I especially liked one treat called calleel. It was basically stuffed crust pizza, though the cheese used wasn’t stretchy like Terran ones.

Some booths didn’t have anything I was interested in, but had obviously set up in such a way as to be basically unwinnable. Sure, they let the small prizes get taken, but if one wanted the big ones, or even the middle ones, they had to knock things over that were either extremely heavy, like solid metal cans, or were nailed down.

These booths I destroyed.

Not literally, but if I noticed that they were cheating, I revealed their cheating. Like seriously if throwing a ball hard enough to dent a metal can doesn’t knock it over, there’s obviously something wrong with the picture. Usually I gave the prizes from places like that to people who had been cheated out of their money. After all, I could easily collect dozens of prizes easily.

Also, if I wanted to I could come back the next days under other disguises and win again and again. I reserved this treatment for two cases. Cheaters who must be destroyed, and those who had interesting prizes but only let people win once. In one instance, I found a secluded place to change and then went back eight times in various guises in order to collect a set of dolls. They had no clue it was the same person, though they may have guessed that we were related somehow, but each persona was pretty different, male, female, tall, short, skinny, less skinny (Because there’s no way I’d willingly become fat except in extraordinary circumstances).

As the festival was city wide, there was no way I was able to visit every part of it, so I stuck primarily to the main roads as well as the central plaza, where the vast place had become a maze of booths and stalls.

There was also plenty of entertainment to be enjoyed. There were bards and musicians all over the place, along with those performing various other tricks and feats. Fire eaters, jugglers, animal trainers, and so much more.

But the most popular show was the tournament in the arena. The place was packed, barely letting me get in, even when I arrived two hours before it started. I hadn’t gone to the first few days, since they were the preliminaries, weeding out the weaker contestants for the lower division. They’d had to do it in large groups since there were so many people competing for the prizes.

When I heard what those prizes were, I was again tempted to participate, but again decided against it. They weren’t worth wasting days of my time waiting around in a room packed with sweaty fighters, or however they decide to make fighters wait for their turn, when I could instead be roaming around and enjoying myself.

However, while I didn’t want to wait around bored, or reading books that I’ve been meaning to for years, I had no problem spectating the better parts of the tournament.

Mages casting massive flashy spells. Swordsmen swinging swords and releasing slashes of ki, or qi, or chi, aura, or whatever they decided to call it. Archers raining arrows. Spearmen stabbing stuff… yeah, some of them were powerful but boring. Still, a good number of the matches were quite exciting. There was even once when a summoner called up a dragon! Unfortunately for him, it was a baby dragon, and completely ignored the summoner, playing around in the arena until the summoner’s opponent was knocked out and the dragon disappeared back to wherever it had been summoned from.

After seeing that I was interested to know how summoning worked in this world. In the last one, one had to create a contract with a living being and they had to pay some kind of price to the being in order to summon and command it. There were all sorts of rules to it, like you couldn’t ask them to do something that was against their will. Like if one could summon a unicorn, it wouldn’t let a male ride it. Unless it was gay.

Which was actually quite funny. Most unicorns are cis female, and they court males by showing off how attractive they are to female humans, usually children. I had the good fortune to get a show when a gay male unicorn tried to attract a mate by running into a town and scooping up not one, not two, but three young boys onto its back, then prancing around the town, showing off its riders. Unfortunately for it, that particular herd didn’t have any potential mates for it, so it had to try again elsewhere. The boys were ecstatic about the event… and had also proven to have similar tastes to the unicorn they rode, and ended up starting to date each other once they realized they weren’t alone. Their parents on the other hand weren’t so happy. Especially the town’s lord, a baron, who’s sole child and heir was one of the boys.

Anyways…

Summoning over there had summoned a portion of the spirit of the being one had signed a contract with, while creating a temporary body made of mana, so unless someone used a spell that damaged a being’s spirit, when the body was destroyed, the spirit simply returned to it’s body.

Here, I doubted any contract had been signed, since the summoner was as surprised as the audience was when he’d summoned a dragon. Or perhaps he’d signed a contract and the portion of it called to assist him had only allowed the youngling form and manners that we’d seen?

It intrigued me. Unfortunately, I’d yet to find a reliable source for magical knowledge on this world without having to sign away myself to a guild. I’d read the contract one had to sign to join the mages guild and it was extremely restrictive. On top of clauses about not teaching or sharing most information with non-guild members, there were even hidden clauses that basically made the signer a slave in certain instances, including preventing one from rebelling against the guild. Even if a madman took the leadership, if they did it within the rules, they could command the guild to do almost anything they wished.

So unfortunately, I would have to find out more about local magic from books, but they were hard to get. Maybe I could find a mage who was breaking the law and loot his atelier when taking him down.

Something to think on.

The tournament continued and at the end of the day, this division ended with a magic swordsman taking the prize. He’d been a great fighter, efficiently wielding both his blade and magic, while still giving a good show for the audience. His blade was a magic sword and helped act as a focus for his spells. A long metal wand, that he’d even had vibrate in order to cut through an opponent’s shield earlier. He hadn’t restricted his spells to ones only using his blade, but cast plenty of walls and balls and other spells to defeat his opponents.

As this was the second of the four divisions, his prize was nice, but not over the top. A lot of gold and the crown paying for a custom weapon from a famous blacksmith for the guy. The higher divisions would be getting even more gold, and would get bound weapons, and some other hidden prize for the top division.

A bound weapon was like in games. It could only be used by the person it was bound to, though since this is reality, they could usually willingly and without coercion pass it along to another. Some were literally only usable by the one it was made for, but most could be passed along. The weapons tended to be extremely powerful, and required some rather rare materials in order to make, as well as taking an obscene amount of time to do so, sometimes years. Some of the ‘bound weapons’ weren’t even actual weapons, but armor or accessories.

With the show over for the day, I left the arena and went back to wandering the festival. I would be back the next day for the next division, but sadly the top division required tickets that I hadn’t been able to acquire.

Well, I could have gotten some… from scalpers, some things never change, but I wasn’t wanting to pay the outrageous prices they were asking for them. Sure I had a large fortune in my inventory, but it just wasn’t worth the hassle. Nor could I determine if they were real tickets or fakes without getting my hands on them, so I just didn’t bother. There was plenty of other stuff I could do at the festival.

Since I couldn’t attend the last day of the tournament, I opted to go and see a play, the one about the founding of the kingdom half a millennia ago. It was… rather boring actually. Long speeches about the grandness of the first king, then merely a noble, lower ranked at that, as he rebelled against an evil empire that was fracturing with the power struggle of having lost it’s ruler with no heir declared, and dozens of potential heirs.

I read up on it later. The empire had been destroyed, eventually breaking up into seven different kingdoms… as well as an uninhabited wasteland where the place’s capital used to be when one of the heirs decided to try and kill all his siblings by blowing them away with magic, but ending up with more than he’d bargained for since it destroyed the entire bloodline, himself included, turning them into explosives. He literally went nuclear, along with the rest of his family. It was a good thing all of them were in the same place, or the idiot might have caused massive damage to the entire continent.

I considered walking out of the theatre halfway through, but stuck it out. I just stopped paying much attention to the play, opting to read instead. I found a spell to turn sap into syrup. It intrigued me.

Once released from the tedium of the play, I enjoyed myself wandering the festival and goofing off.

Outside of the games and entertainment, I’d also done plenty of shopping. Most of it was window shopping, since I didn’t really need anything, but I found some things I wanted. For one, a bookseller that had a few magic books. Introductory, yes, but at least they were available. There was also a good number of unusual foods I picked up. Some I’d had or bought back at the port, but others were new to me, so I had to try them and buy what I liked.

After enjoying myself for six days, I went home and got some rest. The next day was the last day of the festival, which meant that I had a ball to attend.