And perhaps—if Cara had been that better [Actor] she might have judged her audience. Because she was just beginning her next lines when someone interrupted her.

“And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful—”

Violetta tugged on her arm anxiously.

“Cara. Miss Cara, what are you doing?”

“Violetta! I’m performing!”

The [Actress] spun, seriously put off her game. The younger girl looked anxiously up at her.

“But what are you saying? You’re talking like a [Poet] or something.”

“It’s a play! Just listen—apologies, everyone. This is a play! A retelling of a story, and this is a speech! I pray you listen, good people!”

The villagers watched Cara stride back to the center of the field. She began anon, reciting the entire speech of ‘All The World’s A Stage’ verbatim. Cara had memorized that speech, and she was proud of it.

When she was done, the village was silent. But not…speechless.

“I don’t understand it. Why is she reciting poetry?”

“It doesn’t mean much to me. One man has seven ages? That’s too many classes for me. What about being a [Mage]?”

The audience muttered amongst themselves. The old woman with the scythe cleared a section of the field, but in an annoyed motion.

“Bring Violetta back. I can’t work to this.”

She called out, her voice not loud so much as pitched. Cara blinked.

They didn’t like it. She realized—too late—that she had lost them somewhere after the first verse. The iambic pentameter, the delivery—it bounced off the working field-folk. She faltered—

And realized she was bombing in front of her first audience in this world.

It was one thing for Sir Ian McKellen to stand his hour to an audience who knew him, knew what moment they were getting into, and appreciated the vernacular of Shakespeare, even demanded it.

Quite another for Cara to go into an audience of people who spoke what was to her ears very modern English and put on a performance.

Let alone a speech with no context. Her stomach dropped. Cara was used to performances with a willing or at least interested audience back home, but she had made a few crucial mistakes, chief of which was performing her version of art. And acting schools across the world told their students to play for the audience. Not just the stage.

She had gone too thespian too quick. Cara held up a hand, thinking.

“Hold on. I have another performance to give. Excuse me—”

Cara raised her voice. She hesitated, scrapped the next bit she’d been planning on reading out and launched into a classic. A true classic.

“I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…near them, on the sand—”