Everyone had gotten so wrapped up in their silly argument that it wasn’t until Grace approached the group of magic users that they realized how much time had passed.
As Grace informed them, the carnival had now officially begun, and fans and other visitors were beginning to flood into the park. The first scheduled meet-and-greet wouldn’t start for another half hour, but Seliah and the Fifty Flip members would want to grab a bite to eat before they committed themselves to that event. As for DreamRise and the Last Light, they had no official responsibilities until midday, but they would still want to get in front of the crowd and make themselves seen. After all, Adah and her teammates were the hosts of this carnival.
“Neil will take photos of all the activities on the official schedule,” Grace said to Adah, “but Seb’s decided to roam around and take candids throughout the day. Just something to be aware of.”
“He’s going to work all day, too?” Adah asked. “After all the time he put into planning this, he should just enjoy himself today.”
“He probably will,” Emi said.
She had a point, actually. Seb was probably still the Last Light’s number one fan, even though he was officially an agency employee. Running around taking photos could be the best way for him to let loose.
“The same could be said for you girls,” Grace added. “We have our own goal for today, but the fans don’t know that. They came here to have fun and, maybe even more than that, to see you have fun. Be sure to give them what they want.”
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Ami said. “Who’s ready to get out there with me?”
The “jovial ones,” as Adah had named them, remained on the same page even now. Emi, Mari, and the others all shouted in agreement, energized by their leader. It seemed Ami even picked up a new recruit in Seliah, who moved closer to the group but didn’t cheer as loudly as her compatriots.
Adah was eager to get outside of the tent, too. The concert stage would nearly be fully decorated by this point, if it wasn’t already. That had been another element of the event that Seb had coordinated on his own, and Adah had no idea what to expect other than what she’d seen when she first arrived at the park. She was equally interested to see just how much of a crowd the carnival had drawn. The interest level online made it sound like the carnival would be as popular as the region’s summer fireworks display, but would that digital buzz translate into actual attendance?
The decorations could lend some atmosphere to the event, but without a sizable crowd, today could never truly reach “magical carnival” status.
Just as Adah was about to call out to Rika to see if she wanted to explore the park along with Sheffa, a hand grabbed Adah’s own and tugged her away from the other magical girls. She spun around and came face-to-face with Iris. Ekki stood by her side and gave Adah a nod of acknowledgment.
“Come with me, please,” Iris said, more like reciting a fact than making a request.
“What for?” Adah said. “Your show or whatever it is doesn’t start for another couple of hours.”
“Indeed,” Iris said, yet started walking away, dragging Adah in tow. “Yet, we need to practice. We will need to be seen together beforehand, as well.”
“Didn’t you hear?” Adah asked. “I’m supposed to be having fun right now.”
“This is my condition for being here today,” Iris said without looking back at Adah. “Everything else can be exactly as you’d like, but you will need to help me first. Once our little demonstration is over, I will leave you alone if you’d like. Oh, and please call out your mascot again. He lends a certain effect to the scene.”
Iris’s two-tailed cat, Iosk, was trotting along near her feet as he so often did. Even Ekki’s crow, whom Adah rarely saw, was perched on the boy’s left shoulder. The path of least resistance was to play along, so Adah called for Izzy. The winged pig revealed himself and floated beside Adah at shoulder level.
“Don’t worry,” Iris said. “This will be to your benefit, as well. Perhaps even more than ours.”
☆☆☆
The air outside the tent was crisp and cold, but not as brutal as some other winter days. Today was a windless day, and even when the evening breezes came in, they would lose most of their bite as they passed through the trees throughout the park. Adah had taken note of a couple booths on the vendor list that would be serving hot chocolate and cider, which would further alleviate any chill today’s visitors might feel.
Though, she also knew the cold wouldn’t stop most magical girl fans. She had been to enough outdoor concerts as a teenager to understand firsthand. When a large enough crowd was packed in around you, and you were getting pumped up to the music of their favorite magical girls, you could hardly feel the cold. So, even when the sun fell and the temperature dropped, she was sure that a full crowd would watch their concert.
Any concerns she’d had about the number of fans in attendance today had also been alleviated as soon as she left the tent. Even this early in the day, before the first meet-and-greet or any other event had begun, the park was full of people. The crowd would only grow in size as the day went on, but already the paths throughout the park were as busy as a grocery store the day before a winter storm.
Iris had accomplished her goal of being seen together with Adah. In fact, Adah felt the eyes of the crowd constantly on them as they walked around. The fans all took an interest, but no one was willing to approach them. They whispered among themselves, probably wondering why these two rivals were walking in such a hurry. Adah had done a little to repair the perception of their relationship when she had visited Ekki in the hospital, but most people who knew DreamRise and the Last Light well were still convinced she and Iris hated each other.
They were right, for the most part, although Iris had downgraded her “hate” to a “dislike.”
After taking Adah and Ekki on what felt like an aimless loop around the park, Iris brought them to a grove behind the concert stage. She must have felt they’d made enough of an appearance for their fans for now, since this area was off-limits to the public. In the cover of these trees, Iris explained how their mini performance would go, and made the three of them work through a couple of practice runs.
That said, there really wasn’t much for Adah to rehearse. Iris would take the lead the whole time they were on stage, so all Adah had to do was play along. Essentially, Iris wanted to show the fans that she and Adah could get along, and to give a proper resolution to all that had happened in the last couple of months. The fans could only observe DreamRise and the Last Light from the outside. Their knowledge of the hydra mission and its fallout was made up solely of what they could infer from that outsider perspective. They might make assumptions based on what they could glean from Heartbreak’s interview on the MGC or Iris’s social media posts, but their understanding of recent events would be primarily speculative.
Iris wanted to set the record straight. Rather, she wanted to align the narrative with her own goals.
She was going to use her time on stage to portray DreamRise and the Last Light as former enemies who had now put aside their differences for the greater good. In a sense, that story was true. Iris, however, planned to embellish reality for the sake of her theatrics. She wanted to give the world evidence to point to whenever the question of her and Adah’s relationship came up. She didn’t want to give the fans room to theorize, she wanted to tell them exactly where things stood.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
The whole plan would make Adah more of a prop than a player, but she was okay with that role. It was in her interest that the fans saw DreamRise and the Last Light as two teams united. If Iris wanted to take the lead on establishing that narrative, then that saved Adah the trouble of navigating the girl’s landmines. The two of them had gotten along well enough lately, but Adah inevitably found herself pissing off Iris with something she said, leading to the girl shutting their whole conversation down. Although Adah had no intention of playing second fiddle to Iris anymore, it would be more convenient to let her take the lead for this display.
Once Iris felt satisfied that Adah knew what her job was, she took Ekki aside to rehearse some extra details with him. Part of her goal with this event was to reintroduce Ekki to the fans. Iris wanted them to know that the Fogstorm Knight was as strong as ever and would continue fighting alongside her and Clair as the three of them built their careers to greater heights. Of course, she’d make no mention of what Ekki had said earlier about feeling tired. The fans didn’t need to know how much further the boy had left to recover.
The DreamRise pair’s practice left Adah alone with time to kill before she needed to step on stage. She sat down and leaned against one of the trees in the grove. She’d be on her feet most of the day, so she wanted to rest when she could. With Izzy by her side, she decided to make the most of this downtime.
“That Iosk,” she said, nodding toward Iris’s cat mascot, “he’s one of the Keteriel, isn’t he? I remember during the IndieMagie, you didn’t seem to like him very much.”
Back then, Adah had figured the two mascots simply had some frivolous spat. But given how Izzy acted toward Iosk compared to the other mascots she’d seen him interact with, the more likely explanation was that the cat had also been part of that group of mascots with a superiority complex in the past.
“Indeed he is,” Izzy answered. “And he holds firm to his beliefs about our kind. As such, you can imagine what he thinks of me. I am something worse than a traitor in his eyes.”
“So he’s one of the ones who want to use my scythe to prove their point,” Adah said. “In that case, he probably views Iris as another experiment, doesn’t he?”
Izzy was slow to reply, but eventually said, “She is of interest to the Keteriel. Less so now that they have set their eyes on you.”
“Is it possible for mascots to have influence over a magic user’s spells?” Adah asked. “I had thought her [Fleur-de-lis] was a spell Iris had come up with her own plan to acquire, but do you think it may have been Iosk’s doing? Surely it’s not a coincidence that the magical girl he’s paired with ended up with such a unique spell.”
“It is possible he directed the girl in a way that would lead to her receiving such a spell,” Izzy said. “We do not know the full extent of what humanity is capable of in terms of utilizing essence. I do not doubt that Iosk uses the girl to test those limits. If he desires to use magic a certain way, perhaps he is first seeing if it is possible for a human to do so.”
If that was true, it made Iris even more of an experiment than Adah had originally meant. There wasn’t necessarily anything wrong with Iosk pushing Iris toward acquiring certain spells. It could even be a good thing, if a magic user and their mascot were on the same page. Iris was in love with that [Fleur-de-lis] spell, after all. Yet, something about that approach didn’t sit well with Adah.
She didn’t have much time to worry about Iris and Iosk’s arrangement, though. The magical girl in question walked back over to Adah with Ekki by her side. Iris held out a hand to help Adah stand up.
“It’s time,” Iris said. “I would tell you put on your smile, but I suppose Heartbreak doesn’t need one.”
Adah allowed Iris to lead her to the back of the concert stage, where the girls and Ekki were set up with handheld microphones by the event’s technical crew. Since this little show would be short and informal, the three magic users didn’t require much further preparation. Considering the two-hour prep time Grace had scheduled for tonight’s concert, Adah was grateful to take such a casual approach now.
Getting on stage in a much lower stakes performance would be a good way to acclimate herself ahead of the real concert, as well. She would have plenty of time while Iris spoke to get used to standing in front of a crowd, to consider how expressive her face would need to be so all the fans could see it, and to practice her mic control.
Once they were given the go-ahead from the tech crew, Iris rushed up the portable stairs leading to the stage without any warm up or deliberation. Adah and Ekki had no choice but to chase after her or be left behind.
Although this was the most minor activity of the day—not as interactive as the meet-and-greets nor as exciting as the concert—the crowd that had assembled was still the largest Adah had ever been in front of. She didn’t have many points of comparison, but she had to guess there were a couple hundred people spread throughout the clearing reserved for the audience. She would lose track if she tried to count all the faces gazing up at her. At the very least, this was a larger crowd than when she and Iris had stood on stage together during the IndieMagie.
Iris, however, was unfazed by the crowd. She spoke into her microphone with absolute clarity, and adjusted the strength of her voice to the perfect volume by the end of her first word.
“Welcome to the new year, everyone!” her voice rang out.
The crowd erupted—clearly the region was as enamored with Iris as ever, despite how DreamRise’s growth had slowed. Iris feigned another moment of red-faced shyness, just as she had during the IndieMagie.
“Every time I see this many of you, I always have Heartbreak by my side,” Iris said. “That’s not fair. It makes me feel like I’d only see half of you if she wasn’t here!”
This earned her another chorus of cheers from the crowd, each of her fans eager to prove they had come here for her. However obnoxious Adah found the girl’s crowd work, she couldn’t deny it worked, at least with her type of fan.
But Heartbreak couldn’t allow Iris’s crowd appeal to slide uncontested.
“If you’re going to cheer that loud for her right in front of me,” Adah said, “maybe I ought to make you squeal just as loud.”
The crowd wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that at first, but eventually another cheer did break out in Heartbreak’s favor. Adah also noticed a smaller portion of the crowd forcing a much more unpleasant sound out of their throats—squeals, presumably. Surely those were piglets who were here solely for Heartbreak. How lucky for her…
From that point on, Adah didn’t have much to do. This event was labeled “A Thank You From DreamRise,” with Heartbreak featuring as a guest. Iris spent most of their stage time doing as the event title suggested: thanking the crowd. It was their support that had allowed Ekki to recover and, as far as Adah could tell, Iris seemed genuine in her appreciation toward the fans. Ekki also showed off his magical arm in the same manner he had inside the tent earlier, assuring everyone this was just another step in the journey of the Fogstorm Knight.
Adah offered a few choice words as Heartbreak here and there, but her main role was to accept a gesture of thanks from Iris at the end of the girl’s remarks. The DreamRise captain had prepared a gift for Heartbreak—what else but an actual iris, one which matched the girl’s own yellow color theme.
Adah was ready to accept the flower, as this scene had been part of their rehearsal, but she was caught off guard by what came next.
After Iris handed the flower over to Adah, she brought her mic up to her mouth again, but no words came. Tears welled in her eyes, then streamed down her cheeks. She swept them away with both hands, though more immediately took their place. A murmur began to spread through the crowd, at which point Iris rushed forward and flung her arms around Adah. She pressed her face into Adah’s shoulder and let out a series of loud sobs.
As if Adah needed any more reason to doubt the authenticity of those emotions.
Yet, the charade seemed to fool the crowd. Even if they weren’t genuinely convinced, they were at least willing to buy into the act as part of a show. The fans began to clap, as though there was a real emotional resolution taking place on stage.
While her arms were wrapped around Adah, Iris spoke softly through a magic channel.
“I trust you’ll repay me for this one day?”
Implicit in her words was the expectation that “repaying her” really meant helping Ekki down the line.
What Iris had done was equivalent to declaring defeat, at least temporarily, to Heartbreak. For all her aspirations of power, she was still willing to make herself weak in this moment. Of course, even that was nothing but a calculation. A perception that the bad blood between herself and Adah had cleared would work in her favor. Now that the Last Light had grown more popular than DreamRise, it was simply to her advantage to appear as friends.
Everything went exactly as Iris had said the last time Adah had visited Ekki’s hospital room. Iris had no intention of playing by any rules but her own. Sincerity and honesty were weights that would only slow her down. In order to help Ekki remain righteous, she would turn even more conniving.
“It’d be easier if you asked me honestly,” Adah said back to her.
Iris said nothing, but broke their hug a couple of seconds later. She took a step back and looked at Adah with a weak smile on her face. Her eyes were damp with tears that had yet to fall. If Adah didn’t know better, she almost could have believed that face.