With a second place finish in the first episode’s challenge, Adah had avoided today’s penalty but hadn’t much else to show for her effort. Ciel had claimed first place, and the sabotage and exemption from next week’s challenge with it. How exactly that sabotage functioned wouldn’t be revealed until next week, but its impact on the next challenge was less important than its impact on the season as a whole.
Ciel’s victory today cemented her position at the top of the cast’s food chain. If anyone from her posse had gotten the idea to defect next week, the power of sabotage would give them second thoughts. Now more than ever, it was in everyone’s best interest to stick with the pack and focus on undercutting Adah and Ren. Even Zoe would be motivated to silently endure this week’s penalty in order to stay in Ciel’s good graces.
Though, it seemed that Ciel didn’t intend to rely on intimidation alone to keep her clique in check.
The cast members were treated to a late lunch while the crew put the finishing touches on the third and final set of the day. Toward the end of this break, Zoe was pulled into a dressing room to put on the maid outfit that today’s penalty called for. While Zoe was changing, Ciel interrupted the splintered conversations of her entourage to bring them all together once more. She spoke to them like a coach drafting up a play for her team. Adah had elected to keep her distance from the other girls, like she had during their earlier break, so she couldn’t hear what Ciel said. She had no doubt the girl was planning something, though.
Before Zoe returned, the rest of the cast was led onto the third set that Adah had seen that morning. This one was made up to look like a parlor café drenched in pastel colors and some of the thinnest furniture Adah had ever seen. There were three circular tables—not much more than discs held atop legs like eyelashes—spread throughout the room, each with three wiry chairs arranged around them. When Adah sat down at the table farthest into the room, she feared the chair might snap beneath her.
Ren joined Adah at this more isolated table without a word, while Ciel, Felt, and Pirouette all sat together at the front of the café. Tiella shared the third table the last member of Ciel’s group, a Region 1 magical girl called Iyswell. Adah couldn’t remember if that was her real name or not. She hadn’t paid much attention to her self-introduction, but that was how Iris always referred to the girl.
With everyone seated, Arthur introduced today’s penalty to the viewers at home. Of course, the cast had been given a fair warning about this first penalty, so the details came as no surprise to them.
“Now,” Arthur brought his preamble to a close, “please enjoy some freshly brewed tea to help you wash down your lunches. Let’s give a warm welcome to Zoe, who has been such a good sport about things.”
Zoe walked onto the café set with tiny steps, her eyes fixed firmly on the tile floor. She had on an altered maid outfit consisting of a drapey black dress with a white apron and accents, like the kind you’d see at the themed shops this café must have been based on. The crew must have prepared a few different sizes based on what they knew of the girls in the cast, and then made any quick adjustments during lunch to the size that best fit Zoe. The dress fit Zoe well in spite of that fact, and if there were any pins holding extra fabric in place, Adah couldn’t spot them.
However well the getup fit her, Zoe’s face still flushed bright red upon standing in front of her fellow cast members and the cameras that littered the café.
Seeing that embarrassed expression, Ciel sprung her plan into action. She hopped out of her chair and rushed over to Zoe with glowing, wide eyes.
“What the hell?” she said, running her eyes all over Zoe. “You’re so cute in that! I’ve never seen an outfit like this up close—it’s like cosplay!”
And just like that, Ciel’s little army of sycophants joined her.
“Oh, you’re so right!” Felt said as she came up next to Ciel.
“You know what would be fun?” Pirouette added. “We could all dress up like this together for Halloween.”
“You’re a genius, Piro,” Ciel said with a beaming smile. “The fans would go crazy for that. Actually, Zoe, would you mind if we all took a picture with you? You’re seriously too cute right now.”
Zoe finally cracked a smile of her own and said, “Sure, that’s fine. If you guys really want to.”
“You should say, ‘That’s fine, Mistress,’ shouldn’t you?” Felt said. “I thought that was part of the penalty.”
The smile began to fade from Zoe’s face, but Ciel stepped in the very next second.
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“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” she said. “The penalty hasn’t even started yet. Don’t be weird, Felt!”
Felt shot Ciel a fleeting grin before holding up her hands and apologizing to Zoe. Iyswell and Tiella joined the party soon after, and the six of them all started snapping photos and fawning over Zoe. They probably would have kept on for the rest of the day if Arthur didn’t step in to remind them there was still a penalty segment to film. After some complaining, they all went back to their tables.
The main activity of today’s penalty game involved the maid serving her “masters,” which really just meant pouring the other girls tea and saying some canned lines for the camera. It was a situation that could only be as unpleasant as the other cast members made it, and Adah certainly wasn’t interested in torturing Zoe. The pretend maid came to Adah and Ren’s table first. Neither of them said much other than thanks to Zoe as she poured their tea into a couple of ceramic cups.
Adah kept her eyes on Zoe as she moved from her table to Tiella’s and finally to Ciel’s. Considering how quiet she was being, Ren must have been watching Zoe as closely as Adah was. When Zoe reached the third table and started to pour that trio’s tea, Ciel made another move.
“Hey, Zoe,” Ciel said loud enough for the whole room to hear. “If you happen to forget to call me ‘Mistress’ during the rest of the season, I really wouldn’t make a big deal out of it. If you catch my drift?”
Zoe gave her a confused look at first, but her eyes lit up after Ciel winked at her.
“Yeah, yeah,” Zoe said, nodding and smiling. “I get it. Thank you!”
Ciel smiled back and took a sip of her tea. “It’s very tasty,” she said, and both she and Zoe laughed.
Adah glanced over at Ren, who hadn’t touched her tea at all. She had her sights set on Ciel’s table, watching with that same analytical focus as when she’d first arrived at the studio that morning.
Adah could guess at what Ren was thinking. Ciel was hard at work maintaining her group’s cohesion. The manipulation had started back when she insisted on taking pictures with Zoe in her maid outfit, as a way to flip what was supposed to be an embarrassing situation into a positive one.
Ciel was setting the standard for how to treat Zoe’s penalty and leaving everyone else no choice but to fall in line. If anyone tried to be a stickler for the penalty rules after Ciel had acted so kind to Zoe, they’d be setting themselves up as the season’s villain. Once someone else had cut her slack, you’d only seem cruel to force the punishment back onto her.
Ciel had made sure everyone in the room—including the production crew—heard her comment about not caring whether Zoe followed the season-long portion of the penalty. Zoe was supposed to refer to the rest of the cast as “Master” or “Mistress” during filming, but Ciel had effectively negated that rule with an offhand comment. That moment would inevitably wind up in the final cut of today’s episode, partly because it portrayed Ciel in an interesting light and partly because it solved a problem that the show had to be conscious of. Depending on the severity of the penalties, the show ran the risk of coming across as too harsh or exploiting its cast.
Those same criticisms could be made of the magical girl industry as a whole, which was surely a connection that the producers wanted to avoid.
Ciel’s act here helped sell the idea that everything that happened on the show was all in good fun. The final edit would support that image, and so would the rest of the cast, lest they risk the audience’s ire.
Somehow, Ciel was turning her sacrifice of Zoe into an opportunity to earn the girl’s loyalty. By the end of filming, Ciel wanted Zoe to forget that it was her strategy that had put the girl in last place in today’s challenge. She wanted Zoe to think that was merely an unfortunate coincidence. After all, Ciel had been so supportive during the penalty.
Region 1 truly was a snake pit.
“Adah,” Ren said without taking her eyes off Ciel’s table. “What did you do to Iris that made her change?”
“Huh?” Adah said. “Where’s that coming from?”
“That challenge made my mind wander,” Ren said, still not looking at Adah. “The challenge and… Anyway, what was it?”
“I’m not really sure she’s changed at all,” Adah said. “I guess she’s nicer to me now, but you should hear the things she says about you.”
Ren turned to Adah and flashed her shark-like teeth.
“So she is feeding you info about us,” Ren said. “Forget about what she says, though. I’m talking about the way she acts. The old Iris would have rather burned down the whole stage than let someone else take the spotlight. But every time I see you two, she’s always standing aside while you lead the way. Like you’ve got her trained. How did that happen?”
Adah took a sip of her tea. The taste was too bland for her palate; there was a reason she preferred those sugary coffee drinks.
“A lot happened,” she said, “but I don’t know how much I had to do with any of it. I mostly just happened to be around for it. She’s been through a lot.”
The more Adah learned about everyone in the coalition teams, the more it seemed that they all had been through a lot. Maybe that was the reason they’d all come to share the same goal.
“If you mean what happened with her boyfriend, I don’t think that’s it,” Ren said. “The two of them… I won’t pretend to understand them, but I know they wouldn’t change on account of each other.”
Back at Ketzia’s cabin, Adah and Ekki had mostly talked about how he’d changed, but even that conversation supported Ren’s feeling. He hadn’t said he’d changed for Iris’s sake—only for himself and his ambitions. For Iris, it must have been the same.
“I don’t know if anyone did anything,” Adah said. “If Iris has changed, then it was her own doing. If anything, maybe I just showed her she could get away with doing what she’d always wanted to do.”
Ren didn’t respond right away, and instead continued to stare at Ciel’s table without regard for Adah or the cameras throughout the room.
“I think I get it,” she finally said.
The two of them stayed quiet for a while longer. Arthur and the cameras had enough to focus on with the exaggerated way Ciel and her crew fawned over Zoe. Eventually, it was Ren who broke the silence.
“This tea would have tasted a lot better if Ciel had made it,” she said.
“That’s true.”
Just to be sure, Adah checked Ren’s cup.
She still hadn’t taken a sip out of it.