“Well ladies! Please come to the stage so I can give you all our second midweek challenge!” Drake announced bright and early once again.

    When the contestants arrived at the stage once again, Drake had already set up everything up for the purposes of their midweek challenge. “Well ladies, to go with a similar theme from last week, I’ve designed this midweek challenge to test out the trait that ‘a good magician’s assistant must be able to fit themselves into tight, compact spaces’. So, to test out which of you is the best at this, you have an hour to figure out how to fit yourself into the smallest container you can possibly think.”
    “Now, the ground rules are rather simple. Number one, no straight shrinking. This is for the benefit of the audience, and to also force you all to come up with some out of the box thinking. Number two, no disappearing of body parts. So you can’t just disappear all of you and say you take up no space that way. Number three, no animal transformations. Again, we want to make the contest a little bit interesting and it’s all too tempting to simply transform into a single-celled organism. We will be using this,” Drake pointed to a metal box on a table that had been set up by stagehands, “it’s a shrinking box that will be able to tell us exact measurements of how small you’ve managed to get. So get to it!” Drake said, dismissing the contestants to figure out their solutions.

~~~
An Hour Later

    “Alright ladies,” Drake said, addressing the women once more, “Let’s see what you’ve got. First up, we have Saffron!”
    “Okay, I hope you all realize that nobody can use this for Saturday now,” Saffron winked, having the stagehands wheel out a rather large looking blender. Saffron stepped on in, giving the thumbs up sign for Drake to hit the button and begin her ‘trick’. As soon as Drake pressed the button, the blades began whirling at an almost blinding speed, Saffron’s height quickly diminishing as she was cut into smaller and smaller chunks. After several seconds, Saffron was practically a fine dust at the bottom of the blender, being cut into so many fine pieces that the blender blades simply pushed her body around. After several more seconds, Drake pressed the off button, and had the stagehands struggle to pour the dust that was now Saffron into the metal box. The box began to shrink, until it was roughly 40 cm on each side. “Well, looks like we have a starting size of 0.06 meters cubed! Let’s move on to the next contestants!”

    Next to go was Leela and Jill, who do to the similar nature of their performances, were edited together so that viewers could watch the different takes on what was essentially the same idea. Jill had pulled out the automated wringer from her bedroom for the purposes of her performance. Jill lined herself up with the open end of the wringer, and felt the wringer slowly move up her body, the flattened version of herself exiting out of the opposite end of the wringer. There were some notable points where the wringer took slightly longer to flatten her (primarily her breasts and her head), however it went without incident. She had briefly considered feeding herself through the wringer a second time, however she had never flattened herself multiple times overs, so she was fine with doing her best to fold herself to as small of a form as possible. When she had stopped struggling to fold herself, the stagehands came over and picked her up, placing her into the metal box which quickly began shrinking. The box ended up being about 10 cm on each side, giving her a total volume of 0.001 meters cubed.
    Leela, on the other hand, had many experience of multiple layered flattening, and as such asked for a stagehand’s help in sending her through her wringer multiple times and flattening her again after folding her. Eventually, after about seven passes, Leela was roughly the size and shape of a piece of brown chiclets gum and despite being put through the wringer one more time, Leela would not get any smaller. As instructed, the stagehand put the small piece of Leela into the metal box, the box shrinking to match her gum-like dimensions (roughly 1.5 cm x 1.0 cm x 0.4 cm). Similarly to Jill, her score was not announced by Drake, instead being displayed in an infographic listing her score as an amazing 6 centimeters cubed.

    The penultimate contestant to go was Cammie, who said, “it looks like I wasn’t the only one to burn one of their reject ideas for Saturday as the solution,” She had the stagehands wheel out David’s rather large oven from the kitchen. The only modification that Cammie had made was pulling out the two racks that were on the inside of the oven. She had thankfully preheat the oven to 450 before the show began, so she simply had to climb into the oven and wait for her trick to take effect.
    Rather than most tricks involving heat, Cammie did not melt. Instead her heat began to char up, taking on a black tone and slightly shivering up as the heat around her ate up her body. While it may have looked like it hurt to an outside observer, to Cammie it felt similarly to how she imagined it would feel to get a tan from a tanning bed, slightly hot but overall not unpleasant. As her body continued to shrivel up, bits began breaking off and turning to ash. After several more minutes, Cammie’s entire body had been turned into a pile of ash, which the stagehand had to awkwardly scoop out of the oven and place into the metal box. The box began shrinking, reaching about 13 cm on each side, for a total of 0.002 meters cubed, placing her out of the running as well.

    “Lastly we have Ophelia,” Drake said.
    “While everyone gave a valiant attempt, I have the answer to the problem,” Ophelia said, walking over to the box. She uncorked a vial she had prepared in her hour of preparation and took a sip of it. Before everyone’s eyes Ophelia’s form began to lose definition, her features mixing in with her outfit as her body became a sort of gray outline of a person, which became more and more see through as the potion took effect. Once it was clear that Ophelia had turned herself into a gas, she entered the box. The box began to shrink around her, getting smaller and smaller, easily passing the other contestants’ sizes. As the box approached the size the box got when Leela went, it continued past it, getting to roughly a half centimeter on each side before finally stopping.
    “Well everyone, it looks like Ophelia has won!” Drake said, opening the box and allowing Ophelia out. The gas that was now Ophelia began to solidify, finally returning her to her naturally gothic self.
    “Great. What did I win?” Ophelia asked, brushing her hair out of her face slightly.
    “Well, that’s up for the viewers to decide!”

    To Saffron: “What do you do with your body parts while they're not in use? Do you store them away? Vanish them? Transform them into something more portable?” -FlexibleAnatomy

    Back home, if I decide to not use any of my body parts, I simply absorb them into my body. That way my sisters can’t just go into my room and steal my parts and act like it’s okay because “I wasn’t using them anyway”. The only downside is that when I do that, my body still has the same total mass, making me more dense, since I’m the same mass for a lesser volume. On the bright side, it also means that it’s a lot easier to return my body parts when I need them, since I can just will them back at any time, rather then having to go physically pick them up and reattach them.
    But for yesterday, since I didn’t really expect anyone to steal my parts, I simply just disconnected my consciousness from my body and left it on my bed. It’s honestly a lot easier magically speaking, and that way I was light enough for Fernando to carry without having to struggle.

    To Saffron: “Have you ever consider having a bodiless party with the other contestants? I just have this feeling that you making your body disappear might be a recurring thing and thought that you have "nobody" around to enjoy it with is all.” -quad2

    That sounds like a great idea! The only problem is that everyone else only seems to be interested in either practicing or worrying about what their gonna do for Saturday. I’ll see what I can do to get a party going on Sunday, but I make no promises if the others will actually want to show up.

    To the producers: “Remember how you got on David's case for "playing favorites" in a way that was necessary for Jill to compete at all? How long until Ophelia's continued demands reach the point where you're no longer willing to humor her multiple flavors of genre-blindness?” -HeraldOfOpera

    The reason we scolded David for his ‘playing favorites’ was due to the fact that the problem he was addressing in assisting Jill was a problem exclusive to herself that the other contestants could not get the same advantage if offered the same assistance. In fact, we’re certain that if David had offered to perform magic to help out the other assistants, they would be insulted that David did not trust them enough to perform their own magic.
    In Ophelia’s case, there is nothing stopping any of the other contestants from demanding David to change the style of show that he performs with them. In fact, he already does this, although not to the degree with which he does with Ophelia. If the other contestants put as great a demand, they would be granted it on the grounds that having David perform a specific way during an act is not a disqualifying offense.
    Now, if she began making demands such as forcing David to stop practicing with one contestant to practice with her, or using her magic to prevent another person from being able to practice or perform, then we will have to put it in consideration. However, she is well aware of the rules she agreed to when signing the contract to appear on the show, so we don’t expect that to happen.

    To Ophelia: “We don't have to get used to it. We can simply vote you off at the next opportunity. You do realize that, right?” -HeraldOfOpera

    You are indeed correct. However, I am very comfortable with the person I am, and as such I refuse to act in some sort of fake manner simply to appeal to individuals who will never meet me in real life. If you dislike it, it is your right to do such, but I will not change myself to appease the whims of the mob, even if that means I shall lose this competition.

    To Saffron and Leela: “You seriously believe that an internationally-televised competition would have a single-digit number of votes? Excuse me while I go talk to life's manager... What do you mean that's not a thing?” -HeraldOfOpera

    Author’s Note: Alas, I thought I was going to be able to coast through this entire interactive without having to break the illusion that this wasn’t a story in answering all of these questions, yet I couldn’t think of a way to answer this question in a reasonable manner using any of the characters that I have created in the story without just explicitly stating, “No, your understanding of things is wrong” and it seeming weird. So, I guess I’ll quickly go over to how I’m going to be representing votes within the context to the in universe show. As you stated in your out of character comment directly after this question, I never explicitly mentioned the raw numbers in the interactive proper, as it would definitely be a weird thing for a show that is supposedly a well liked television program to only have 9 people vote. As with my previous interactive stories, I tend to use the description for a variety of things, but never (at least, I’m pretty sure I’ve never, I have been doing these for several years now) have referenced information conveyed through the description as a direct representation of a character’s knowledge in universe (Note: This is not an invitation to go looking for a counter example, which I’m certain exists, I’m simply saying what I try to avoid doing).
    I originally wasn’t even going to list the direct results of the poll, as you need an account to be able to end a straw poll, so the only way I have to prevent people from voting after the voting period is to delete the link to the poll, and the only important point of the poll is who is kicked out. However, I decided that wasn’t fair to the readers, and so my initial plan was to simply include the poll results as percentages, however as someone who has taken several statistics course throughout my education, I know that percentages are an extremely easy way to lie with statistics, and felt that if I hadn’t given the raw numbers, your next question to Cameron probably would have been a comment on how I had intervened in order to help keep him in (which I didn’t). Which, basing my guess on the comment you left on the very next part after the poll results, where you reference misrepresenting the votes to help Cameron, I’m pretty sure my assumption is correct.
    As such, I’m officially going on record for how poll results are seen in universe: The overall spread of votes determines how much a loss is by, so for instance, the fact that there were 3 characters who tied for second, then Holli had a very close loss to the other contestants. Similarly, if characters tied in the final results, then they are close together in the votes, however whichever character reached the amount of votes they have now determines how much greater or less than they are to one another (so for instance, I only checked the polls this round a couple of times throughout the day, so from my best estimate Cameron was second to last, followed by Ophelia, then Jill, but I might be wrong). Any contestants who got 0 votes will be considered to have received a non-significant amount of the votes (outside of 2 in-universe standard deviations in explicit terms), but will not have received no votes. If two players get zero, past performances will be used to judge their performance (so, in this instance, Saffron scored slightly more votes than Leela, since Leela won the first voting contest).
    Now that I have gone over that, you have a fair point that, in context to the overall story, having any one digit votes (such as zero votes) does not make any sense. As such, I have gone back and updated the dialog in the offending scene slightly so as they no longer reference direct numbers. I hope that this slight hasn’t tarnished your enjoyment of the overall interactive, and that you continue to enjoy and participate. I will continue to do my best to try and avoid these mistakes that require my intervention in the future, however understand that I am human.