The atmosphere inside the DreamRise agency office today felt a bit thin.
“Do you get off on this?” Iris asked. “Is humiliating me that pleasurable for you?”
“Come on,” Adah said. “We’re all friends here, right?”
Iris looked between Adah and Sheffa with narrowed eyes and said, “I think I could find a dozen more appropriate words for both of you.”
Sheffa tried to wrap an arm around Iris’s shoulders, but the girl slipped out from under her as smooth as a professional boxer. Sheffa smiled a pure, puffy-cheeked smile in return.
“It’s all good, Pettan,” Sheffa said. “My girls and I don’t have any hard feelings about that stupid competition. It’s ancient history.”
“Don’t give me such a weird nickname,” Iris said. “And of course you don’t mind—you won.”
These two would go at it all day, Adah was sure, so she decided to intervene rather than waste any more time.
“Look,” she said. “We all agreed to meet. Let’s not act surprised about who showed up now that we’re actually here. Sheffa came a long way, so we shouldn’t waste time fighting.”
In fact, both Adah and Sheffa had traveled to be here. The two of them had elected to meet at DreamRise’s base of operations as a middle ground between their own agencies, and Iris had begrudgingly agreed to that arrangement. The DreamRise office was also convenient for its lack of distractions in comparison to the Last Light’s. While it would have been fun for Rika and the twins to reconnect with Sheffa, it also would have meant everyone would get less work done. Since she was asking a favor of Iris and Sheffa, Adah wanted to put their time to good use.
Now that Adah knew what kind of show she had signed up for, she needed to know what kind of magical girls she’d be sharing the screen with. In the show’s free-for-all format, each of those girls would be her competition in a very direct way.
“I suppose I’ll start,” Iris said, handing Adah a sheet of paper. “I would have texted you all of this, but I’d prefer to avoid having it traced back to me in the event they dig through your phone. It was troublesome to come up with useful information when the challenges are secret, but you should be able to make use of everything at some point. Special talents, worst fears, old grudges against other girls you may be able to reignite—it’s all in there.”
Adah took a look over the notes Iris had compiled. Her old rival was responsible for sharing as much background info on Adah’s co-stars from Region 1 as possible; Sheffa would handle the token representatives from Region 2 and 3 who were also joining. As expected, Iris’s notes were thorough. She was a bottomless pit of spite, after all.
“This is everyone then?” Adah asked as she read through the list.
“Yes, yes,” Iris said. “Ren, Pirouette, Felt, and so on. The only one I couldn’t help with was this Ciel person. I’ve only ever spoken to her in that group chat, and she’s quite careful about what she reveals. The other girls won’t say much about her either. She seems to have set herself up as their ringleader.” Sheffa clicked her tongue and rubbed a hand under her chin. She peeked at the names on Iris’s list as if to confirm something.
“Say, Pettan,” Sheffa said. “This Ciel is the one with blonde hair, right? Like yours but left out in the sun too long?”
“I’d prefer you didn’t compare us, but that is correct,” Iris answered. “Call me that name one more time, though, and you’ll be leaving here without hair.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sheffa said with a wry smile. “Don’t worry, Adah. I can tell you plenty about this Ciel girl. She was at the Ivendawn Idol Fes with us, and she made Petals here seem like a saint.”
“I submit,” Iris interrupted. “Please just call me ‘Iris.’ When you say Petals, all I can hear is the other word.”
Sheffa smiled again and continued, “She makes Iris here seem like a saint. ‘Ringleader’ sounds about right to me, but she’s a ringleader of her fellow idiots. She’ll never make her moves out in the open. Anything other people might see, she’ll have one of her lackeys handle. She likes to keep up appearances, but only because that makes it easier to manipulate the situation. The Idol Fes was like a little ecosystem for her to spread her mind control fungus throughout. Once all the staff and other girls were infatuated with her, then she tried to screw with us from the shadows.”
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“A fungus, huh,” Adah said. “As gross as she sounds. No doubt she’ll try to do the same with the show’s production crew. Maybe even try to get them to rig a challenge in her favor.”
“Or against yours,” Sheffa suggested. “As for the girl from our region, Tiella, I wouldn’t waste your time thinking about her. No offense to her, but her biggest strength is sucking up to people. I’d be shocked if she doesn’t start clinging to Ciel by the end of the first episode. I wish I could tell you that you could make an ally out of her instead, but I doubt it. She’ll figure out that Ciel is top dog, and from that point on she’ll be a lost cause.”
“What if I start winning the challenges while Ciel loses them?” Adah asked. “Any chance of flipping Tiella to my side? Or any of the girls, for that matter?”
Sheffa bit her lip before answering, “I don’t see it happening. My impression of Ciel is that she wouldn’t let herself lose in the first place. If things start looking bad for her, she’ll sabotage one of her own allies rather than take the hit. The other girls will pile on because, hey, better that other girl than them.”
Adah wasn’t surprised. That was the kind of mindset that Region 1 cultivated in its magic users. It was all by design.
Ciel might have acted as the ringleader of this current crop of magical girls, but she was merely a reflection of her region’s Secretary. After all, Sirk would never take the fall for anything that went wrong with the Cruelties. No, he’d use Locke as a prop and then toss him aside. He’d pull Elise into his inner circle while shifting blame to Secretaries Carrol and Borzage. He always had a way out. He’d step on as many heads as it took to keep his own above water.
Ciel was only following his lead.
But was the same true of the rest of Region 1?
“What about Ren?” Adah asked.
“What about her?” Iris said. “She’s a useful distraction, I suppose. Any week where you get to sit out the challenge, she’ll become the next target. If you win enough early on, maybe the other girls will have so much fun screwing her over that they forget about you.”
“Would they really gang up on her instead of one of the other girls from outside Region 1?” Adah said.
“I told you, didn’t I?” Iris said. “Ren got ahead of all these girls at some point. The fact that she’s been relegated to a show like this probably has them salivating. It’s open season on the two of you. And don’t think for a second that they’ll only go after you during the challenges—every part of that show is a chance for them to fuck with you.”
Sheffa nodded slowly with her eyes closed, looking oddly like an old warrior reminiscing on a battle from long ago.
“I can attest to that,” she said. “That Ciel girl even tried to break into our dressing room at the Idol Fes. Nora caught her, but she obviously has no limits when it comes to this sort of thing. You should definitely bring your manager to watch your back if you can.”
“You also shouldn’t neglect the possibility of them targeting you outside of the show,” Iris added. “If things start to go too well for you, that’d be a convenient time for a scandal to drop.”
“But I haven’t done anything scandalous,” Adah said.
“Aren’t you an angel?” Iris said while rolling her eyes. “That’s not the point. Even if you had enough skeletons in your closet to make an archaeologist blush, these girls would likely invent a scandal anyway. They’ll figure out what kind of story would cause you the most trouble and run with that.”
“If they put half as much effort into fighting Cruelties as they did all this drama, humanity wouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Adah said. “Instead, our most powerful magical girls are wasting their time with nonsense.”
“They’re playing the game they were taught to play,” Iris said. “You don’t have to join them, but if you want to use this show to our advantage, then you at least need to understand how they think.”
In the end, that was why the three of them had met up today—this show was more than a vanity project for Adah.
Although Adah had drawn some interregional attention here and there through her feud with Thibault and the launch of the coalition, this show would be the first time she stood truly in the national spotlight. She’d be sharing the screen with a girl like Ren who—regardless of what Iris said about her—was an undeniable celebrity. A massive chunk of the country, including that asshole Sirk, would tune into the program each week. That was an opportunity worth taking advantage of.
In the eyes of most fans, Region 1’s magical girls were the industry standard. The more hardcore fans took pride in supporting underground or rising star talent, but they were the exception to the rule. As such, most of Ready, Steady, Go!’s viewers would be tuning in to watch Adah’s competitors. If this show was a popularity contest, that’d be an insurmountable problem, but the current iteration of the rules actually made Adah’s relative obscurity work to her advantage.
Most of the viewers would know someone like Ren of the River. That meant the show was more of an opportunity for the other girls to lose fans than gain them. For Adah, it was exactly the opposite. She just needed to beat the rest of the cast at their own game.
Winning challenges and avoiding penalties would give her the FP boost she needed to take on tougher Cruelties, while simultaneously showing the world that these Region 1 girls weren’t anything special. If she could become the star of the show, her name recognition would skyrocket, and she could take the rest of Region 4’s coalition along for the ride.
There was a risk, though. Lose too many challenges and suffer too many penalties, and she’d only reinforce the impression some fans had of Region 4—a wasteland where the most powerful magical girls amounted to Cruelty janitors. Adah could very well create a new obstacle for the coalition to overcome if she wasn’t careful.
More unpleasant than that, however, would be giving Sirk the satisfaction of seeing her fail. That could not happen.
Adah intended to maintain her perfect record of throwing the schemes of egotistical Secretaries back in their faces.