Fandom High School

They had made an entertainment. Whether it was watchable, or even made sense at all, was debatable, but at least everyone should get to see the result of the hard work they all had put in. Seivarden had to admit that the students had at least made some effort, even if some of them lacked talent, and even if she knew she and Amaya were no experts, she felt they had done a decent job, all in all.

That was until she started watching.

Amaya still thought it was great. But Amaya also liked RoboCop.

At least there was plenty of popcorn.

Feel free to just throw it at the screen.

Between the handful of projects that Amaya had taken on recently, when exactly did she find the time to make a tiny armada's worth of tiny Radchaai ships? Don't worry about it. Where there's a will, there's a way. For all anyone knew, she'd actually made them months ago just for funsies and now finally had a good use for them. There were also some surprisingly accurate model Radchaai guns.

And here everyone thought Amaya only watched Radchaai entertainments for the explosions! Although this lesson would definitely cover that, too.

"Today," she announced to the class, as they met in the workshop classroom again, "we work on special effects! Today we're going to work on things like how to make it look convincing to have these ships fly without anyone noticing the strings, how to rig up these guns to shoot convincing lasers, and how to properly explode something," as if there was a way to improperly explode something, "once those lasers hit!"

Which meant that this was going to be a classic Amaya Instructional Ramble class today, because this was a woman who go way too into technical details and explosions, all of which was going to be incredibly handwavey so that the player didn't wind up on some kind of list for excessively googling 'how to make explosions.'

Seivarden could have added her own knowledge of explosives, but she was going to let Amaya shine here. "Let's not forget that there's a story behind the excitement of ships blowing up," she said. "Try to make some time for practicing your scenes too." That was her plan for today, to leave the special effects to Amaya and to make sure the students did an acceptable job as actors, if that was at all possible.

"Good morning, everyone!" said Amaya with her very standard take-charge greeting, because she sometimes forgot what it was like to have a co-teacher who would actually contribute her own weight sometimes. "And welcome back! Hopefully, you've had some more time to think about your characters and develop them a little bit more, because today? We're going to figure out how they go together and we want you to start putting together a plot!"

Which had been previously researched and discussed by the teachers during a very professional meeting that was absolutely not a date, Nina, who wasn't even in this class but Amaya was still a bit incredulous about the insinuation, even if she'd rather die than acknowledge that there had been a insinuation, much less incredulousness about that insinuation.

...ahem. Anyway.

"A plot can obviously be about many different things," Seivarden continued. "But some subjects are less suitable for a Radchaai entertainment. We don't want it to be dull, or about all those boring things in life that no one cares about."

Like skel farming.

"We should have action, drama, romance, but how do you accomplish this with your characters?"

"We're of course," Amaya added, "here to help guide you," from terrible ideas, "towards what might work best, but this week will be a lot like last week, where it's all a bit of brainstorming and coming together to get this thing really rolling!"

To say that this was going to be interesting felt like a gross understatement, but Amaya was definitely intrigued to see exactly which sort of direction that 'interesting' was about to take.

"Hello, everyone," she said, greeting the students (and the very attentive and shamelessly modded TA) with a nod, "and welcome to 'How to Make a Radchaai Entertainment.' Odds are, if you know what that is already, you know exactly what you're about to be in for, but there's a good chance you have no idea what that means, in which case, I'm going to leave explaining that to one of the two Radchaai in this room to do the actual explaining. Seivarden?"

Seivarden agreed with the interesting.

"You might be familiar with Earth movies. They are similar to Radchaai entertainments, although they usually make less sense, and are occasionally disturbing. A Radchaai entertainment includes drama, political intrigue, romance, adventure." She made a gesture with her hand. "Characters that you love or hate. Epic spaceship battles."

Here she glanced at Amaya to make sure she had noticed that last bit, and to see if she had anything to add to that description.

Oh, she'd noticed, as was indicated on the big grin on her face (which had appeared just in time to swipe away a less pleased expression at a certain other part of the description).

"The spaceship battles," she added, in a sort of whisper toward the students that was obviously intended to not be much of a whisper at all, "are the best parts."

"Depending on your taste," Seivarden added. "As we're going to make a whole entertainment, we're going to need the other parts too."

"Of course," Amaya agreed with a nod. "And those boring parts just make the good parts that much better! You'll see what we mean; today, we're going to watch a good example, one that has a little bit of everything you'd expect from a good Radchaai entertainment. And, in the following classes, we'll be slowly putting together our own: characters, plot, costuming and sets, and special effects, before we put it all together for the final project."

With two people who had never made a movie before in their lives. One of whom only even knew of movies once she got here. But they were very, very passionate about movies. For some reason.

"Also," Amaya added, with a nod and a statement that was about to unintentionally kill their TA before they even got things started, "we're lucky to have another Radchaai on hand as our TA to help with the finer details, being Radchaai herself, so hopefully Tisarwat's expertise can be put to good use, as well."

Seivarden smiled at Tisarwat, and was a little relieved to have someone else on board whom she was sure didn't mind things that weren't explosions.

"We have a few exciting weeks ahead of us," she said. "So let's get started with watching a good example."