Archangels of War

When the student council finally got to work, it was definitely a nice process to watch. "Throughout the past few days and weeks leading up to this, we've all been planning how to organize the upcoming culture festival. As you may know, the Culture festival serves as almost a new student initiation celebration." Suijin brought up the main topic of discussion. She looked towards Kami. "Thankfully, we haven't gone so far into the planning process that our new members here would be lost." Suijin smiled, while Kami nodded. I pretended not to notice the extra s that she added to the end of members. 

"If I may ask, when is the culture festival?" This was Kami. 

"The first of November." Yuri reminded us of his presence in the room. For as much of an annoyance as he is, as a guard, I have to say, he's fairly effective at his job. I begrudging acknowledge Yuri's skill in stealth and fading into the background. 

"So, we have three weeks to get everything prepared." Kami quickly calculated the time between now, October 9th, and the first of November. "That isn't exactly a lot of time." 

Suijin nodded. "Especially with the idea that we have planned for this one. These things have been in talks for a while, and thankfully, we've managed to come up with a fairly detailed outline on everything that we want to do and create. However, actually building and setting everything up is not an easy task." When she explained the state of things, understanding dawned on not only Kami's face, but on mine. Depending on how complex the plan for things three weeks was more than just a bit of a pressing time period. 

"In that case, just how complex are these plans?" Kami continued to ask more questions, attempting gain a better grasp on the student councils' situation. Suijin looked across the table towards Genji. She nodded, before pointing her finger at the wall behind Suijin, just above the window. She then fired off a light spell, and the room watched interestedly as the one singular spell diffracted and diffused into multiple light beams that shot across the wall in order to form what looked like a complex map of a castle. Looking at the map closely, the high peaks and large battlements, I realized that it looked nearly identical to the student council room. Suijin smiled, not even bothering to look behind her. 

"We call it, 'The Castle of Dreams'" 

The Castle of dreams? A pretty mystical name if you ask me. 

"Castle of dreams...?" Kami muttered the name to herself, seemingly drawn to the mystery and mystique behind it. "What exactly, does this castle of dreams entail? Besides just being a pretty cool name for a place? From what I can see here, its's a remodeling of the entire school. Except the design has been changed to resemble a fairy-tale castle almost." 

Suijin nodded. "It's the 75th anniversary of this magic academy's conception. I thought, would it not be fitting for such a monumental moment, for us to draw back on the roots of magic. Did you know that back before the first appearance of magic, people told fairytales, in which they imagined magical worlds. They viewed these fairytales with such awe and amazement, and even wished for them to be real...." She didn't need to finish her statement, as the message was obvious. 

When actually met with the prospect of real-life magic, they reacted in fear, and in hatred. 

"That includes the entire interior of the school as well." Riko added in. "We planned for there to be no shortage of mechanism that operate within the school that give it that effect. A lot of them based upon real life fairy tales." She snapped her finger, and a draw from behind her opened, and multiple rolled up blueprints were pulled out, almost as if an invisible hand had reached in and grabbed them. 

She used her own mana which was floating through the air and allowed for a wind spell to travel through it. Once the spell reached the draw, in order to open it, she layered the wind spell with an if then magical sequence. That sequence stated something along the lines of, "if spell makes contact with physical object, then reverse direction. That allowed for the wind spell to pull the draw open and caused the blueprints to be caught up in the flow and delivered it straight into her hands. That was the method behind what she had done, just much quicker to give it the illusion that she had invisible hands. I smiled to myself. I loved to analyze magic. 

Genji noticed my smile while I was staring and Riko. Pervert. She mouthed. 

I immediately wiped the smile off of my face and leaned back in my seat. I guess I did look kind of like a creep. 

Riko laid out the blueprints on the table, revealing the plans for multiple different kind of machines, with unique functions. There was a large machine that looked like someone had taken a weed and made it the size of a skyscraper. According to the blueprint, it was supposed to be the height of the school, reaching from the bottom to the academies highest peak, and serving as a sort of makeshift ladder that students could climb. It was named, "The Beanstalk." As I continued to look through the many blueprints that were scattered around the table, I noticed one that was labeled as the counterpart of the beanstalk, "Rapunzel's mane." There were other designs too. A model to turn the luncheon into a massive gingerbread house, plans to decorate all of the training areas in complete snow, with one singular coffin in the center. 

"This certainly is, mysterious." Kami said in awe as she looked from design to design. She began to turn towards me to ask me something, but she stopped. Halfway there a sort of, sad look entered her eyes, and she turned away, shaking her head a bit. I almost wanted to apologize on the spot. I couldn't tell the reason for why that look was in her eyes, but- 

It's probably your fault. The voice inside my head said mercilessly. 

Kami then turned her head towards Riko and Ayung. How hard do you think these would be to make?" 

Ayung answered her question. "In truth, these aren't exactly very difficult to make. it's not like were designing special magic technology that has extremely complex functions and require a large number of layered magic sequences. These are a lot of extremely simple designs, some of which don't even involve magic sequences. Given the time limit, I don't suspect that we'll need even two weeks to complete everything." 

"Just two weeks?" She had been expecting there to be a tighter time frame. She shook her head. "If that's the case, then it's a good thing, right? The entire display can be up and ready a week before the festival even starts." She failed to see any need for worry. Besides the task of delegating and assigning work for the creation and placements for decorations, there wasn't any more work to be mindful of. 

"And that's where the conflict arises." Ichijo spoke up this time. "Suijin, and all of us on the council have all agreed that we want the unveiling of the caste of dreams to be a surprise. Therefore, setting things while students are still going to school, is a no go." A new problem presented itself. If this whole thing was to be a surprise, they would have to get everything up a day or two before the festival occurred. Looking at the number of blueprints on the table, and the diagram on the wall, that would be high-near impossible. 

"Thankfully, we managed to convince the headmaster to allow the week before the festival to be no school." Before Kami could even reply, Suijin revealed the solution to the problem." 

"That then leaves us with a week before the festival to set everything up." It didn't take Kami long to realize the problem. "Since you want this to be a secret, only a select few trusted students will actually be allowed to work on this. Meaning we'll have significantly less manpower than expected." 

Suijin nodded. "You take on quickly." She looked at the clock. "Ah! It seems that I've held you for a bit longer than I wanted to. Turns out, we actually were able to take it slow." She smiled happily. I realized that this was also probably part of her strategy as well. By framing it as if we were going to speed through the meeting, Suijin had set it up so that she could, in a metaphorical sense, pull the rug from underneath us, in how slow she actually paced this meeting. 

"Just some things to think about. When we meet tomorrow, lets discuss some ideas. Meeting, Adjourned!" Suijin raised her finger into the air and smiled happily. Everyone at the table couldn't help but smile as well. It was infectious.