Calling these “real books” might have been a stretch. The shelves throughout the library were indeed stocked with individual items that resembled books, but most of them were facsimiles of the true article. Oftentimes, the prop books were made of a chunk of cardboard with covers on each side. They functioned enough like books that you could check inside of them for symbols, but that was about the extent of it. That shouldn’t have been a surprise—sourcing thousands of actual books would have been a stretch for a TV show of this size.
Still, the fact that Adah couldn’t flip through the books’ pages did nothing to diminish the herculean task before her. She had started her search with the tall perimeter bookcases in the leftmost section of the library, figuring that her one advantage over Ciel’s group was the speed with which she’d left the challenge starting line. She could at least control one of the ladders and lock her competitors out of that side’s upper shelves.
That strategy seemed logical, but it wasn’t producing much in the way of results. Adah had searched through four of the bookcases out of the eight that lined the leftmost wall and found zero symbol books. In that time, Ciel’s posse had finished strategizing and spread themselves throughout the library. Adah could look over her shoulder while standing near the top of her ladder and see the other girls zooming down the aisles like worker bees in service of their queen. With even average luck, they’d decipher all five symbols before Adah solved just one.
There had to be another way of winning this challenge. There had to be some trick or clever deduction that could give Adah an advantage—anything at all. Otherwise, wouldn’t the challenge just devolve into a situation like this, with one group cashing in an easy victory at the expense of an outcast or two? That wouldn’t make for good television, and whoever designed this challenge must have known that.
That’s what Adah told herself, but here she was, pulling books off the shelves one or two at a time and praying she’d get lucky enough to find a symbol within their covers.
She was tempted to run around the library and search various sections at random, banking on the thought that it was unlikely that the crew would have placed multiple symbol books in a single bookcase. Surely they’d be distributed more evenly throughout the room. However, that would have been a play of desperation. Without some kind of system to guide her search, she’d forget which books she’d already checked and which she hadn’t. That approach relied too much on good luck, and Adah’s luck had been in short supply ever since the IndieMagie.
The best she could do for now was work her way down the leftmost wall one book at a time. Every time she flipped open a cover, Adah let herself feel the same anticipation and hope, praying that finally she had found a book with a symbol inside. If she could at least decipher one symbol and feel as though she’d made some progress, she could motivate herself to keep moving forward. But every time, the inside cover was blank, and despair pulled Adah’s heart ever deeper into her stomach.
The repetition of the task was driving her insane, and the titles of these faux books was only exacerbating the issue. Some of the books had titles that could pass for real novels or textbooks—names like The Sobbing of Lot 59, Dialectic of Light and Mint, or The Cat in the Flat. Most of them, however, had titles of complete gibberish, as if they’d been randomly generated to ensure each one was unique. Porcelain Under Sucrose and Beds Otter Weak Week—nonsense of that nature. They were like passwords, their only purpose being to enable this game with the symbols and the mystery goal book.
After reading so many of these titles, Adah’s own thoughts were turning to gibberish as well.
And it was in that semi-delirious state that an angel reached down to her. From the top shelf of the final bookcase of the left wall, Adah pulled out a book titled Of Intense Ecstasy. Inside the front cover of this book was a symbol.
Adah nearly dropped the book in her shock, but managed to keep her grip and her cool. She had to be subtle, lest one of Ciel’s gang notice she’d made a discovery. She set the book back in its spot and continued searching the rest of the shelf while she thought through what she’d just learned.
The symbol printed inside Of Intense Ecstasy was the crossed-out square, the second symbol on the paper Arthur had handed out. That meant the second word of the goal book’s title was “of.”
Adah had to laugh. Indeed, her luck had run out long ago.
A five-word title with “of” in the second position—surely that narrowed down the field dramatically.
She had uncovered possibly the least useful of all the symbols. A whole wall of the library dug through, and that was all Adah had to show for her effort. It hadn’t been an angel reaching down to her but a devil. A demon offering her a false salvation, trying to break her spirit by taunting her.
Too bad for that devil—its plan wouldn’t work on her. She’d fought wicked men and monsters alike this past year, and a trick like this wouldn’t stop her now.
Though, her own plan wasn’t working either.
She needed to change her approach. Not a play of desperation, but what about a play of compromise?
Cooperating with Ciel was impossible, but the same may not have been true about Ren. Iris had never said the girl had it out for Adah, only that Adah could benefit from throwing her to the wolves. That was how the rules of the show were set up, after all. Everyone’s main motivation was to avoid a penalty.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
But what if Adah and Ren could both benefit from choosing not to leave the other behind? Ciel’s group would almost certainly decipher all of the symbols first—they outnumbered Adah and Ren too severely. However, they’d still need to find six copies of the goal book before they could all avoid today’s penalty. That final step of the challenge was Adah and Ren’s last hope.
Ren must have come to the same conclusion by now. The thought of cooperating must have crossed her mind. And now, Adah had something to offer her in return.
Once she finished searching the last of the left wall’s shelves, Adah made up her mind. She ran across the library, ignoring all of the aisles and their many books, heading straight to the right side of the set. Ren had started her search in the opposite corner from Adah, and she couldn’t have progressed too much further than Adah had. Sure enough, Adah found Ren crouched at the end of the library’s right wall, pulling books out one by one from the bottom shelf.
“Ren,” Adah whispered. Ciel’s group would likely notice if she and Ren started to work together, but she might as well try to stay subtle for the time being.
Ren glanced behind herself for a moment, but immediately returned to checking the covers of the books in front of her.
“Instead of distracting me and wasting your time,” she said, “why don’t you focus on the challenge.”
“I am focused on the challenge,” Adah said. “That’s why I’m here. If you and I don’t work together, we might as well flip a coin for last place.”
“If you keep standing around like that, there won’t be any need to flip a coin.”
Ren didn’t bother looking at Adah any longer. For the first time during this challenge, Adah truly noticed all the cameras around them. She’d seen cameras mounted on the bookshelves, but they’d quickly faded from her mind as she searched. She’d forgotten all about the cameramen roaming the library until now; it was hard to ignore the crew member standing just a few feet away, pointing his lens at Adah and Ren.
This was still television. The eight of them were still being recorded, and so far Adah had spent this challenge doing nothing worthy of entertaining the viewers at home. At this rate, her footage would be spliced into a short montage of her aimlessly searching shelves until there was a hard cut straight to her suffering today’s penalty. Like the showrunner had told her earlier, he’d solve problems in the edit. A poor performance in the challenge could simply be edited into comedy instead.
Adah had no interest in being the butt of a joke like that. Even if she couldn’t win, she could at least make a play. With the cameras on them, she’d force Ren to make a decision.
“The second symbol is ‘of,’” Adah said. “That’s what I’ve found so far.”
Ren froze with a book still open in her hands. She said nothing in the next few seconds, but eventually set the book back onto the shelf. Then, she sighed.
“‘The,’” she said while holding up three fingers. “So I guess we’re still screwed, Heartbreak. Good luck.”
Blank of the Blank Blank.
In the end, the whole challenge was a joke at their expense anyway. It had been too much to wish for, that Ren might have found a unique word or two that could let them skip straight to solving the whole title. Even with their efforts combined, they had only uncovered the most generic of clues.
Ren paid Adah no mind after revealing her own discovery, and soon moved on to the nearest aisle of shelves. At the same time, Felt rounded a corner and caught sight of the pair of outcasts. Rather than risk giving away any info or allowing Felt to taunt them, Adah left to return to where she had paused her search before.
As she ran across the library, Adah spied two members of Ciel’s posse at different points: Tiella and the Region 1 magical girl Pirouette. Each of them held a book tight to her chest, such that Adah couldn’t see the titles on either the front cover or the spine. They must have held their books that way intentionally, which likely meant both those books contained a symbol.
That was a strategy best suited to a coordinated group of people. Once you found a symbol book, you could carry it with you to prevent anyone else from finding it. If you were searching alone, you could maybe manage the same with one or two books, but any more than that would slow down your search. Especially when climbing a ladder and pulling books off the shelves at the same time, carrying extra books around could even be dangerous. That was why Adah had opted to leave that first symbol book behind—she could make faster progress with both hands free.
The production crew must have considered this strategy, right? They must have prepared multiple books that contained the same symbol, so that two people could decipher that symbol through two different books that happened to have titles starting with the same word. Otherwise, even a single person could bring the challenge to a stalemate by hoarding a book or two. Every cast member had been given the same code of symbols, so there had to be multiple books containing each symbol for the challenge to reliably reach a conclusion.
Obviously, the same had to be true of the goal book. That much was spelled out in the rules.
Adah’s mind got stuck on that thought for a moment. It was obvious, but what was so obvious about it? While she pondered that absurd question, which could only have resulted from numbing her brain by flipping open hundreds of empty books, she bumped into a third member of Ciel’s group.
Zoe, the magical girl from Region 3, bounced off Adah but managed to catch her balance. Adah offered her a quick apology and then looked her over out of habit. She didn’t appear hurt, but she was holding something that grabbed Adah’s attention: another book. Maybe she hadn’t been holding it as carefully as Tiella or Pirouette, or maybe it had dislodged when Adah bumped into her, but Adah caught a glimpse of its title.
Of Mice… and something.
So that meant Ciel’s group had found an “of” book as well. They’d solved at least three out of five symbols, and it wouldn’t be long before Felt found the same book Ren had come across earlier.
The one silver lining of this discovery was that it proved each symbol could be solved via multiple different books. The existence of two “of” books implied the same for every symbol. At the very least, Ciel’s group couldn’t lock Adah out of completing the challenge.
As Zoe ran off, Adah stopped in place. She looked at the bookcases along the library’s left wall, filled with so many books with so many ridiculous titles. After opening so many of those books, Adah had only found one symbol.
“So that’s it,” she whispered to herself.
Instead of returning to the left end of the library, Adah turned around and sprinted back in Ren’s direction.
Between the two of them, Adah and Ren had horrible luck in this challenge. All their work had resulted in one symbol apiece, each leading to a generic word in the middle of the goal book’s title.
But if they could find a single stroke of good luck, then Adah may have figured out a way for them to win this challenge.