From one meeting to the next.
If Adah had to guess, she must have spent half her time over the past couple of months meeting with various people—Elise, Sirk, Lina, Michel, Seb, the coalition members, and so on. The other half of her time was mostly occupied by siphoning the cores of Cruelties she hadn’t killed herself. Of course, she had no one to blame for this situation other than herself and her own ambitions.
The day after she’d capitulated to Sirk and agreed not to raise a fuss about the humanoid task force, Adah made plans to meet with someone equally as pleasant. On the bright side, she and Iris had chosen a much more casual and convenient location for their discussion by comparison.
The two girls met up at the same karaoke lounge as their last rendezvous. Iris arrived dressed for a date, with a pure white skirt that fell past her knees and a baby blue blouse covered by a white cardigan. As if that wasn’t enough, her hair was all done up and even adorned with a blue bow. Adah had come to respect the girl’s commitment to maintaining appearances, but she also felt all that effort was an unspoken attack on the jeans and jacket combo she had opted for today.
Although Iris had been the one to arrange their meeting, she wasn’t in a rush to talk. The two of them booked a room and, without any real conversation, Iris selected a track from the karaoke machine and picked up a microphone. She’d chosen an older magical girl song, one that Adah remembered from when she was a kid. The choice made Adah grin. While she didn’t often give off this impression, the truth was that even Iris must have grown up idolizing magical girls in some way.
When her song ended, Iris sat down on the room’s couch and stretched her arms over her head. Her mascot Iosk lay cross the top of the couch like he had the last time she and Adah visited this lounge, so she scratched his head with one hand. The other hand passed the microphone to Adah.
“Your turn,” she said, and that was all.
Perhaps Iris hadn’t wanted to discuss anything at all. Perhaps this was just them hanging out.
That seemed unlikely, but Adah held her tongue for now and chose her own song. She followed Iris’s lead and selected another song from that slightly older era. She’d forgotten some of the lyrics over the years, so her performance turned out choppy, but Iris didn’t comment on that.
Once Adah finished, Iris simply grabbed the mic from her and selected another song. This time she went with a slow love song from a Second Generation magical girl named Velia Serendipity. Adah had never liked the song much in the past, but she didn’t mind hearing Iris perform it. From the way she was able to make it her own, she’d clearly sang it many times before.
“You’re pretty good, you know?” Adah said as Iris finished up and sat down beside her. “It doesn’t seem like Ekki or Clair’s thing, but have you thought about doing some solo songs?”
She didn’t say it aloud, but it also wasn’t impossible that the Last Light could collaborate with Iris. If not the whole team, then a smaller subunit like Adah and Rika’s Heartshot.
“Even I prefer to keep some joys to myself,” Iris said; her expression looked flat despite finishing up such an emotional song. “That was another benefit of creating this team. I was able to keep singing from becoming part of my job.”
“But you’ll sing in front of me?”
Iris sighed and said, “Only because sometimes you don’t register as human to me.”
Like the other day, her insults were toothless, so Adah simply smiled in return.
“What’s that?” she said. “You see me as the demon princess?”
Iris took one look at Adah, then turned her gaze to the winged pig resting on the floor. Since Iosk was out, that meant Izzy wanted to match him.
“Princess of piglets,” Iris said with yet another sigh. “Anyway, I appreciate you indulging me. It wasn’t half bad, singing with you. It has a different feel than doing it alone. However, I did have a proper reason for inviting you here today. Some of our more unsavory colleagues have been airing their grievances to me.”
“Who’s that?” Adah asked. “My new enemies in Region 1?”
“Or perhaps they’re your biggest fans,” Iris said. “They’ve even put together a highlight reel of you.”
Iris handed her phone off to Adah after pulling up the same group chat she had shown off the last time they met at karaoke. She was shockingly trusting when it came to her phone, though Adah supposed Iris was probably the type to keep anything too personal off her devices.
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“If Porky can’t handle talking to a crowd, how’s she going to perform on TV lol?” the first message on the screen read.
“Maybe being awkward is her real gimmick.”
“Didn’t you know?” Iris replied next. “That’s how she got her start.”
Attached to Iris’s message was a photo of Adah with her face planted in the dirt of that park where she’d first fought the whale Cruelty. Iris was right: Heartbreak had indeed kicked off her career by tripping over her own feet.
“Lmao no way!” one of the girls from earlier replied.
Another girl followed up with a photo of her own. This time, it was a shot of Adah falling headfirst out of the sky during the IndieMagie duel against DreamRise.
“Doesn’t she know a klutz stops being cute after the first time?”
“When you look like that, you have to try everything, right?”
A new girl messaged next, this time with a GIF of an old cartoon. Some scrawny and scraggly character was carrying a tower of dinner plates in each of his hands, wobbling this way and that, before finally falling onto his ass. The plates shattered over his head one by one. The other girls in the chat all made it clear just how funny they found that.
“I’m counting on you all to make a fool out of her,” Iris messaged after. “If I have to stand behind her ever again, I’ll shove her over. Wait, she’d probably just fall on her own.”
Next to Adah, the real Iris took back her phone.
“I have to maintain appearances, you understand,” she said. “If they think we’re buddies, the whole scheme falls apart. Surely you know that if I actually wanted to insult you, I’d do far better than this drivel.”
“I get it,” Adah said. “But I’m surprised they buy your act.”
Iris rolled her eyes and said, “Do they strike you as scholars?”
No, definitely not scholars. Maybe students—they did seem to be stuck in a high school mindset, after all.
Despite the overall vapidity of their conversation, there was one crucial way in which they were better informed than Adah.
“Wait a second,” Adah said. “How do they know I’m on that show? Even I didn’t get an official confirmation yet.”
“Word moves fast among those girls,” Iris said. “And Sirk moves faster. The one praise I can give him is that he’s a man of his word. If he told you he’d throw you a bone, then that means you’ve already got the part. On the other hand, if he ever tells you he’s going to screw you over, then you might as well start writing your resignation.”
Just how true was that statement? It had only been a single day since Sirk suggested he could pull some strings with that program’s showrunner. Not even twenty-four hours later, he’d secured her a slot in its cast? Michel had been making a case for Adah on his own, but all of his efforts had stalled out from the sounds of it. Had they stalled not because of the indecisiveness of the showrunner, but because Sirk had put a halt to things until he’d gotten a chance to bribe Adah?
If that was the case, then he could have just as easily kept her off that show. All it would have taken was one phone call after their meeting, and Adah would have been rejected.
Locke had told her how tight Sirk’s control of the entertainment side of the industry was, but she hadn’t fully understood until now. The man was playing god with his little slice of the world. And if that was where he was spending all of his effort, it was no wonder the the nation had lost track of what a magic user’s real priorities should be.
“Most of these girls will be on the show with you,” Iris continued. “You can imagine how fun they’ll be to work with. They’re all of the same type—utterly self-interested and self-obsessed with about as much self-awareness as empathy. That is to say: zero. There is another achievement to be proud of. Until you came along, none of these girls could agree on anything. Now they’re practically diplomatic. What wonders a common enemy will do for bringing fiends together.”
“Are they all from Region 1?” Adah asked.
That was where Iris had made most of her connections from her pre-DreamRise days, but information on magical girls in Regions 2 and 3 would actually prove more useful in the short term. If Adah had to play nice with Sirk for a while, that also meant she couldn’t cause too much damage to any magic users that served under him. Like Elise had said, they should plan to weaken Secretaries Carrol and Borzage first. They helped enable Sirk to lead the way that he did, and that made them Region 4’s preliminary political rivals.
“Everyone that I can communicate with,” Iris answered. “The girls in that chat will do their own digging when it comes to cast members from the other regions, though. While they have a special disdain for you, they really can’t stand any outsiders. Once they’ve done their research, I’ll see what new details I can fish out of them.”
“Thank you,” Adah said. “Anything you find out about anyone from Region 2 would be especially helpful.”
Region 2 was Apex Vox’s home and, based on Adah’s own texts with Sheffa, those girls were receiving their own share of hate lately. If Adah could do something to address that issue while on this show, that’d be even better than protecting her own skin.
“Later tonight, I’ll send you the info I have about this basket of snakes,” Iris said, shaking her phone. “Their allies, rivals, insecurities—all that useful stuff. I believe you already know one of them, though. That Ren of the River, the girl who can’t keep her nose out of anything.”
“Ren again, huh,” Adah said. “She wasn’t in that group chat, was she?”
Iris shook her head and said, “She’s the subject of them more often than she’s a participant. She may have succeeded in cozying up to Sirk, but she has about as many friends in the region as you do. You—like her—will want to be careful on this show. The other girls may be stupid, but they outnumber you. I believe you know how dangerous even weak Cruelties are in great enough numbers.”
“Do I really need to worry that much?” Adah asked. “It’s just a TV show. What can they do to me? On camera, no less.”
“What exactly did that producer of yours tell you about this show?” Iris said.
“It’s some kind of reality TV shtick,” Adah said. “Like a peek into the normal lives of magical girls. Something to humanize us with everything going on lately.”
A toothy grin cut across Iris’s face, one that Adah didn’t like the look of at all.
“Oh my,” she said. “You’re in for quite the shock.”