When Adah received her official offer to join the reality show’s cast, she quickly learned what Iris had meant about a shock.
Michel walked Adah through a folder of papers the show’s assistant producer had given him now that they were serious about wanting her on board. The folder contained the contract she’d sign once she decided to commit to the show, as well as the program breakdown. That second collection of papers contained all sorts of information Adah expected to find: details like how many hours a week they’d be asked to film, what locations they’d need to travel to, and all the basic logistical info someone would need to know before signing any contract.
The notes in the back half of the breakdown were what surprised Adah. Her concerns started with the wardrobe protocol.
“‘Cast Members are requested to bring their own wardrobe to filming unless notified otherwise by the Producer or Assistant Producer,’” she read aloud. “‘A Wardrobe Team will be present with alternatives while also serving in an advisory capacity. Cast Members are recommended to select clothing with the knowledge that it may become damaged, altered, or otherwise nonfunctional.’”
Adah looked up from the sheet and glared into Michel’s eyes. The two of them were in the agency’s back office, and Michel was reclined in a rolling chair with his feet propped up on the room’s desk. It took him a few seconds, but he eventually noticed Adah’s glare.
“What the hell kind of show is this?” she asked him.
Michel waved a hand back and forth and said, “It’s not like that. If there was any nudity or anything suggestive, there’d be a note explaining that. This is just to let you know your clothes might get messed up a bit. You know, stained or covered in mud or stuff like that.”
“Mud?” Adah said. “What the hell kind of show is this?”
“Just keep reading,” Michel said. “It’ll make more sense as you go along.”
Very quickly, Adah was beginning to wonder if a spot on this show had been worth playing nice with Sirk after all.
“‘Challenges,’” she continued to read. “‘All Cast Members are required to attempt every Challenge but are not required to complete any Challenge. The Producer reserves the right to define what level of participation constitutes an attempt up until the start of each Challenge. There will be a total of eight Challenges across the eight weeks of filming.’”
Adah looked to Michel once again.
“What is this talking about?” she asked.
“It’s saying you can’t skip the challenges if you want to get paid, but it’s okay if you suck at them,” he said.
“Sorry, my mistake,” Adah said. “I meant: What the hell are these ‘challenges’ it’s talking about?”
“Well, we don’t know yet,” Michel said. “That’s kind of the whole point of the show. They’re supposed to be surprises for you. It wouldn’t work if you could plan for them.”
Adah sighed and closed the folder of papers.
“Before I read another word,” she said, “I want you to tell me everything you know about this show. And I want you to tell me in as much detail as you can possibly remember.”
Seeing how serious she was, Michel finally explained the show in his own words.
At its core, the show was a cross between a typical variety program and a competition style reality TV show. It took the social entertainment aspect of a variety show and combined them with the week-to-week stakes and evolving storyline of a competition show. The goal of the program was as Michel had originally explained it to Adah—to show off a more casual or unfiltered side of some popular magical girls. The “challenge” aspect was added to make the show more exciting than its interview-focused competitors, and to hopefully force the girls into situations where they couldn’t help but reveal their true colors.
The show would be filmed and aired on a weekly basis with a total of eight episodes across eight weeks. Those episodes would be divided into three sections, each taking up roughly a third of the runtime.
The first of these was the Social phase. At the start of each week, all of the cast members would participate in some discussion or activity designed to help the fans to get to know them better and for the cast to start building friendships and rivalries with one another. Unlike the challenges, the Social phase was mostly revealed ahead of time. During the first week of filming, the cast would go through some self-introductions and icebreakers. The second week involved “team-building,” the third would see them answering fan-submitted questions, and so on. The Social phase seemed simple enough.
The Challenge phase came next, and was where the real goal of the show became apparent.
Each week, all of the cast members would compete in a challenge, the details of which were known only to the production team. The challenge and its rules would be revealed at the end of each Social phase, leaving the cast members with almost no time to prep or strategize. Supposedly, each Social phase would involve hidden hints about what that week’s Challenge phase would entail, but Adah wondered how useful those hints could be with so little time to prepare.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The only explicit info the cast was given ahead of time was that every challenge would take place in a free-for-all format with all magic and transformations banned. Every challenge was also designed to result in one clear first place winner and one last place loser. The winner of each Challenge phase earned two benefits heading into the next week. While most competitions of this kind would award a prize of some kind, the show’s producer must have decided any real prize would rub viewers the wrong way. Magical girls at this level already had enough money and power, after all. Instead, these benefits were meant to influence the outcome of the challenges themselves.
First, that week’s winner would get to sit out the following week’s challenge. Second, the winner would be allowed to sabotage one other player in the next challenge. The sabotages, like the challenges, remained mysteries for now, but their purpose was obvious. Whichever player received that week’s sabotage was more likely to wind up in last place during the Challenge phase.
Whoever ended the challenge in last place moved onto the final phase of the week: the Penalty phase.
Unlike the two phases before it, only one cast member was required to participate in the Penalty phase. Despite that, the Penalty phase served as the heart of the whole show. The benefits of winning each week’s challenge both revolved around the Penalty phase—sitting out the next challenge saved you from the risk of losing, and the sabotage mechanic allowed you to influence who did lose. Likewise, the Social phase was an opportunity for the cast to form alliances that might spare them from being the target of a sabotage.
From a viewer’s standpoint, the Penalty phase also held all of the stakes of the show. The Social phase could be interesting if you liked one of the cast members and wanted to learn more about them, and the Challenge phase could be intrinsically entertaining depending on what the specific challenge entailed, but the Penalty phase was where all the consequences for that week’s drama and competition came to fruition.
The Penalty phase, of course, subjected that week’s loser to a penalty game of some kind. The cast members were provided more info about the penalties than the challenges, most likely for legal reasons. The penalties would never involve bodily harm, they would not cause lasting effects beyond the period of filming, and other guarantees like that. Each penalty also involved two parts: an initial performance and an ongoing punishment. To help explain what that meant, and probably to quell any worries the cast had about participating, the producer even revealed what the first penalty would entail.
Whoever lost the first challenge would spend the Penalty phase acting as the other cast members’ maid. They would put on a maid’s outfit, serve the rest of the cast tea, and upkeep all the manners and deference expected of a maid. As embarrassing as that would be, the ongoing punishment portion seemed far worse to Adah. While the penalty performance only lasted a short while, the ongoing punishment endured throughout the rest of filming. In the case of the maid penalty, that loser was required to refer to their fellow cast members as “Mistress” or “Madam” for the rest of the show. Given the format of the Social phase, having to defer to the other girls like that each week sounded like torture.
All in all, losing one penalty wouldn’t feel too unbearable, but the ongoing punishments could stack up. If you lost a few challenges throughout the show, you could theoretically spend the last week’s Social phase doing nothing but embarrassing yourself.
“Are they trying to humanize us or humiliate us?” Adah said.
The whole concept of the show was so disconnected from the reality facing magic users. Was this the sort of thing the rest of the industry had been spending all its energy on lately?
Michel tilted his head side to side and said, “Maybe a little bit of both? I wouldn’t worry too much. If you win a few challenges, you won’t ever get put in the penalty games.”
“It’d be a lot easier to feel confident about that if we had any clue what the challenges were going to be.”
At the very least, it was to Adah’s advantage that magic was disallowed during all of the challenges. She had the lowest FP level out of all the cast members, and it wasn’t even close when compared to someone like Ren. She had other disadvantages when it came to potential non-magic challenges—namely her size—but as long as they weren’t playing basketball, she could probably work around that fact.
The real problem for Adah was the format of the show. That must have been what Iris meant to warn her about.
Rather than winning every challenge, the main objective for the cast members week to week was just to not lose. The winner got the perk of sitting the next challenge out, but otherwise you weren’t missing out on much by getting second place instead. This wasn’t a competition with prizes; everyone got a flat fee simply for participating. Therefore, everyone would be totally focused on avoiding the penalty games.
The one caveat to all of this was the sabotage mechanic. Sabotaging another cast member wasn’t actually of much value to the winner, since they wouldn’t be participating in the next challenge anyway. Under a different rule set, the winner might have been motivated to sabotage the biggest threat in the following challenge, but with this format, the sabotage was strictly a social mechanic.
Who did you want to see lose? Who might win down the road and sabotage you in retaliation? Which cast members were your friends and which were your enemies? Those were the questions that mattered.
If those chatlogs Iris had shown her were any indication, everyone on this show saw Adah as an enemy. Everyone wanted to see her lose. It was practically a foregone conclusion that every sabotage would be used on her. Beyond that, since the other girls had no real reason to fight each other for first place, they could coordinate their efforts to make sure Adah came last during every challenge.
Adah smiled.
How fitting for a show full of magical girls. Even in a situation like this, they were being pitted against each other.
No wonder Sirk had been so willing to help her get a spot on the cast. He could act like he was doing her a favor, when he actually setting her up to make a fool out of herself. If that troublesome Twilight Heartbreak was getting too cocky, why not trick her into smearing her own image?
Of course, that’d only work if she did end up losing.
If she won, and kept winning, she’d be the one making a fool out of everyone else and could infuriate Sirk in the process. If the prize on the line was ego, then it was only natural that Twilight Heartbreak would come out on top.
Maybe Michel was right. All she had to do was win a few challenges. How hard could that be?