To call this set a library was no exaggeration. The room itself looked large enough to host a couple of simultaneous volleyball matches if you removed all the furniture. Even its height was sufficient, with the bookshelves that lined the perimeter walls rising as tall as the rafters of the shadowy soundstage. The classroom set had shown off the production’s attention to detail, but this library flexed the wealth of the show’s budget.
In addition to the towering shelves against the walls, the center of the room was divided into a half dozen aisles by rows of bookshelves that stood about a foot taller than Adah. These rows ran the length of the set, all long enough to have a footrace through. And what else could fill all of these bookcases but books? The crew hadn’t cut corners here either—every single shelf was packed with real individual books, from thin paperbacks to hefty hardcovers, with tomes, pamphlets, and every variety of publication in between.
Adah needed only to see that the books were real rather than a facade for the camera to get a sense of what today’s challenge would be. There was only one reason the crew would go through the effort of packing these shelves with so many books.
As a pair of cameraman panned around the group of magical girls, Arthur held open his arms and grinned.
“Today’s challenge is Lost Literature!” he declared. “Hidden in this grand library is an ancient text that magical girls have been searching after for centuries. You girls have an opportunity to claim a copy for yourself—that is, if you can decipher its title!”
Arthur’s theatrics confirmed Adah’s suspicions. The only reason to fill this room with thousands of real books would be to hide a particular one.
Arthur gave the girls a quick rundown of the challenge’s rules. This first explanation was for the camera’s benefit more than anything, worded for dramatic effect rather than clarity. After the crew got the footage they needed, the director brought the girls outside the library for a more thorough explanation while the cameras shot B-roll of the set.
Simply put, this was a scavenger hunt with a twist.
The girls would each be given a slip of paper once the challenge began. On those papers would be a series of symbols, each symbol corresponding to a particular word. The goal of the challenge was to decipher the symbols, thus revealing the title of a certain book. To complete the challenge, the girls needed to find a copy of that book within the library and return it to the front desk to “check it out.” Whoever checked out a copy of that book first would win today’s challenge.
However, the library only contained seven copies of this book, and whichever of the eight girls failed to find a copy would receive today’s penalty.
As for deciphering the symbols, that was a scavenger hunt within a scavenger hunt. Scattered throughout the library were special books with one of those symbols printed on their inside covers. If you found a book with a symbol inside, then you knew that the first word of that book’s title corresponded to that particular symbol. By finding enough of these symbol books, you could decipher the clue and discover the title of the book that would win the challenge.
Hunting for books so that they could hunt for more books—it was an appropriate use a library, if nothing else.
With the core principles of the challenge out of the way, Arthur moved on to explain some extra rules for safety and integrity.
The girls could take as many books out of the shelves as they could carry, but every book had to be returned to its original position if the girls wanted to stop carrying them. Arthur clarified that “carrying” excluded any tricks involving clothing, like stuffing books in your waistband or using your shirt as a basket.
The girls were not allowed to physically impede one another from navigating the challenge area or otherwise use physical force to influence the outcome of the challenge. This rule had one exception: the rolling ladders required to access the highest parts of the shelves that stood against the room’s walls. Only one girl was allowed on a ladder at a time, and no one could roll a ladder while another person was using it. Theoretically, if someone wanted to stand on a ladder the whole challenge, they could prevent anyone else from using it.
In the spirit of the show, magic and transformations were also prohibited during the challenge. Mascots were included in this rule, meaning no one could have their partner search the library on their behalf or spy on the other cast members.
“Other than that,” Arthur finished, “feel free to approach this challenge however you’d like. Work together or fly solo—the choice is yours. If you’d like to bring random books to the front desk and hope you get lucky, even that is allowed. Unless anyone has any questions, we can line up and begin as soon as we finish a quick equipment check.”
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“Will we all be given the same code to decipher?” Ciel asked.
“That is correct,” Arthur said. “In other words, you’ll all be searching for a book with the same title.”
“What happens once you finish the challenge?” Ren said. “Like if someone finishes way before everyone else, what do they do?”
“Once someone brings the correct book to the front desk and checks it out, they will leave the library,” Arthur answered. “At that point, they can no longer participate in the challenge in any form.”
Ren nodded slowly in response, but otherwise gave no reaction to that answer.
After that, no one else had any questions, so the director led them back into the library set and had them line up with their backs against the room’s front desk. A woman—maybe an extra or maybe a member of the crew—sat behind the desk with her hair in a bun and glasses hanging by the tip of her nose. She must have been their librarian, a little extra comedic touch for the viewers at home.
“Please don’t talk or move until the challenge officially begins,” Arthur reminded the girls as he handed them each a folded slip of paper. “And do not look at the contents of these slips either. When I say, ‘Go,’ then you’re free to play as you wish—within the bounds of the rules, of course.”
They may not have been able to talk yet, but that didn’t stop Ciel and her friends from sharing a look.
A few moments later, Arthur got a signal from the crew that the set was prepped and the cameras were ready. A cameraman passed in front of the row of magical girls for one last sweeping shot, then Arthur began his countdown.
“Ready, steady, and… Go!”
The way they’d lined up gave the impression that everyone would bolt off like sprinters from a starting line, but in reality most of the girls stayed in place. Ciel and the five members of her posse formed a tight circle, presumably to finalize how exactly they wanted to handle this challenge.
The core of their strategy was obvious—divide and conquer. Adah had been right about the nature of these challenges. Winning was a nice bonus, but as long as you could guarantee that you weren’t the loser, then there was little downside to cooperating with anyone who was willing to help you. As such, a group like Ciel’s had every incentive to coordinate their efforts and work together to decipher the symbol code. Ciel would probably insist on being the first winner, but who cared? Your alternative was searching this massive library all by yourself and risking a last place finish.
Though, Adah did notice that one girl out of the six had wound up on the outside of that clique’s huddle. Zoe, the single participant from Region 3, had to crane her neck over the shoulders of the other girls to hear what they were all whispering about. Adah knew the least about Zoe out of anyone on the cast, mostly because Iris and Sheffa knew nothing about her either. She had managed to hang around Ciel’s crew back in the classroom, but now that they’d reached the serious part of today’s episode, her spot at the bottom of the totem pole had become obvious. Tiella, meanwhile, had actually wormed her way to stand directly at Ciel’s side along with Felt.
It was worth keeping an eye on their group’s dynamics, but not at the expense of Adah’s own performance. While Ciel and her friends strategized, Ren had already ran to the right side of the library and was pulling books off the shelves a handful at a time. Adah considered asking Ren about a temporary alliance of their own, but the girl disappeared behind one aisle of bookshelves before Adah could decide. If Ren had gotten such a fast start, she must have made up her mind about cooperating with someone else anyway.
Rather than waste any more time, Adah ran to the left end of the library to begin her own search. She opened the slip of paper containing the symbol code on her way. As far as she could tell, there was no hidden meaning to interpret out of their designs. They were all random geometric combinations—a circle with a line through the bottom, a square with an “X” in the middle, and so on.
Adah couldn’t glean any info from the symbols themselves, but the number of them could prove useful. The cypher contained five symbols in total. Since Arthur had said each symbol corresponded to one word, that narrowed down the “ancient text” to any books with a five-word title.
Just as Adah had that thought, she came face to face with the first towering bookcase of the leftmost wall. She looked at it from bottom to top and couldn’t help but laugh. There must have been hundreds of books in this one section alone.
“Yeah,” she muttered to herself, “that really narrows it down.”
Maybe it wasn’t too late to run back to Ciel’s group and beg them to let her join in.
I know you don’t like me, but that Ren girl is a real bitch, isn’t she? Let’s take her out together.
Yeah, right. If that group chat was anything to judge by, whatever Ciel would ask Adah to do in exchange for her help would probably be as bad as any penalty—if not worse.
What about the opposite then? Ren had no love for Ciel, so maybe she’d be willing to team up with Adah. They’d still be outnumbered two to six, but that’d be better odds than searching this library alone.
Then again, if Ren had any interesting in cooperating with Adah, she wouldn’t have run off so fast at the start of this challenge. She hadn’t seemed particularly pleased with Adah’s comments during the Social phase either. If they crossed paths at some point during the challenge, maybe that’d be the time to propose the idea. A spur of the moment alliance might be more palatable to the girl.
In any case, there was no point in standing around doing nothing. The clock was ticking already. If nothing else, Adah could search through the books in front of her while she thought of a better strategy, of some way to outsmart this challenge.
So, she pulled the first book off the first shelf and looked inside its front cover.
There was no symbol.