The video started up, and it was relatively plain in comparison to most of the ones seen thus far. It was just an average quality video of an Asian girl, sitting in front of the camera placed on her desk, her bedroom visible behind her. The Asian girl had her straight black hair parted in the middle, revealing her rather large forehead, and wore a pair of square rimmed glasses and a green t-shirt. The room behind her was rather nondescript, a plain room with tan walls, and a plain white bed in the background.

     "Hi there!" The girl said, smiling at the camera, "My name is Mayaki, although most people call me Maya. I'm currently living at home with my adoptive parents in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho where I'm studying at North Idaho College until I get enough credits to transfer to a proper state school, because it has always been my dream to be a magician's assistant!"

     She shifted around in her seat slightly, a look of concern on her face as though she were contemplating what she were about to do appeared on her face as she continued, "You see... My parents aren't really the most well-off of people. It's not like we were poor, we just didn't really have a lot extra to spend on excess stuff. So the most impressive piece of technology we really had around here for a while was a TV with access to only a couple of local cable channels. We didn't make the big shift to watching everything online until like 2015. Anyways, one of the channels that we used to get had this old public access show featuring this retired magician who would drag people off the street and perform real magic on them, and it made me wish whenever my parents and I were off walking around town that we'd spot him and that he would choose me to transform in weird and wonderful ways. Of course, back then I was too young to realize that the 'people off the street' were really the same five assistants in different costumes and make-up, but hey there's a lot of stuff we didn't realize as a kid that we know now. The show's off the air now anyways... so I guess it really wasn't that important..." she bobbed her head downwards, her mood souring through her explanation.

     She stopped, took a deep breath, and whispered to herself, "C'mon Maya, you've already ripped the band-aid off before. You don't even know these people."

     She looked back up at the camera, her face showing slightly more confidence than her voice was letting on. "So, when America's Next Great Assistant happened last year, it was one of the first big reality TV shows that I actually got to watch live, and one of the big moments I distinctly remember was when Cammie revealed after the first week that she was actually a girl, and how sympathetic and supportive everyone around her was... And it really helped to inspire me to change my life by finally coming out about a big secret that I had been keeping most of my life..." Maya took another deep breath, before reaching up to her glasses and pulling them off.

     The square-rimmed glasses came off as expected, it was what else came off with it that was unexpected. As though it were a pair of novelty glasses, the lenses of the glasses had the image of Maya's brown eyes printed on them. This was not nearly as weird, as the fact that Maya's cute, petite nose seemed to pull away with it as well.

     What was left behind the glasses was a single, horizontal slit that stretched across the entire frame of her face. The edges of this slit extended upwards, several long lashes extending outwards as it was revealed that what the clearly magical glasses were hiding was a single eye that took up the majority of Maya's face, a very thin, long unibrow formiunibrow above it. Unlike the eyes on her glasses, the iris of her single large eye was blue rather than brown.

     "So, I'm a Monoeye, have been my whole life. According to Mom and Dad, my biological mother was a human, while my biological father was a Monoeye too. She put me up to the adoption agency after I was born with one eye, and my father revealed his secret to her... Mom and Dad took me in, and started paying for enchanted glasses so that I could have as normal a childhood as possible.

     Of course, I was really confused by it all. I didn't realize the sort of stigma that sentient nonhumans faced back in the days, especially because I remember going to school with several hemihumans. But then, as I grew older I realized that many of the hemihumans and nonhumans started being slowly pulled out of the classes and put into 'specialty' classrooms to offer them an education more beneficial to their biology. While some of these make sense, like how I know that all young merpeople can breath on land, but that many start losing that ability as they grow older and mature, but I still don't see why some of them had to swap out. For instance, I knew this one girl named Hanna who was half-oni, so the only visible difference between her and our classmates was that she had tiny horns and was slightly more buff than the average girl her age, and she was pulled out for 'safety concerns' when you could have literally asked any girl in our class and she was one of the nicest people there!"

     Maya blew out some air, the tips of her unibrow extending upwards at her annoyance from remembering this old injustice. She calmed down a little continuing, "Anyways, so I bit the bullet and revealed to my friends over the summer the fact that I was a Monoeye, and to everyone else at the start of the school year. I was really humbled by the fact that most of my friends who really knew me well took the reveal really well, and mostly everyone else didn't really seem to care. There were, of course, the occasional person who wasn't really aware of nonhumans asking me uncomfortable questions, like whether I have depth perception problems (I do, but thankfully I wear a corrective lens for that). I'll also get the rare bigot who feels its appropriate to just come up to me and badger me about how I shouldn't be allowed to attend a 'normal people' college, or that my birth is an 'affront to the lord's plans' but thankfully I've always had a friend around to help me out of those situations and support me when it matters.

     But now I guess it comes to the big question that you producers have probably been asking yourself. Why would a nonhuman want to be a magician's assistant? It's one of the most magic-heavy jobs out there, and most nonhuman species either cannot store up magic reserves, or have very limited usage of magic, and you're right. As a half-Monoeye hoping to get into magic, it's been extremely tough for me. I've had to practice and train myself almost ten times as much as my peers in order to even reach being called below average, and I didn't have the necessary credits to get into even the most lax magical university, hence why I'm in community college right now.

     But that's exactly why I think I should be allowed to compete on the next season of America's Next Great Assistant! I know too many people, both human and nonhuman, who can't achieve their goals because they can't visualize themselves ever being able to get there. They get discouraged by hearing that nonhumans can't do magic, when in actuality, there's honestly more nonhumans that can do magic than can't, because a majority of nonhumans have at least one human ancestor. Magic may start out as a muscle that people either have or don't, but I know better than anyone that if you if you have that muscle, you can work it out just like anyone else and make it strong! I may not be the most magical of the contestants, but you better believe that I'm going to be the most hardworking."

     There was a passion in Maya's words that slowly extinguished, as she collected herself and said, "Yeah. That's why you should choose me to compete. Oh, as for what I would do if I won? Obviously, take up the position as an assistant and leave community college behind. Probably donate a part of the million dollar payout to my parents as thanks for helping raise me and let me live at home while I went to college. Buy them the largest TV possible so that they can watch my shows whenever they want. Oh! And try to help inspire more nonhumans and hemihumans to start picking up magic."

     "And... Yeah. I think that's about everything. Really hope you'll pick me. Um... Goodbye!" Maya clicked something off screen, and the video shut off.