“Um… Girls?” The uncertain voice of Frankie awoke the girls at the normal time that Howard would have awoken them, “Please make your way to the front lobby.”
~~~
Lobby
In the front lobby, Frankie stood, a wicked smile on her face, while Drake was frantically pacing about, muttering, “This whole season’s been a complete disaster! I knew I shouldn’t have listened to David! ‘Trust me, Drake! Howard knows what he’s doing!’ Oh… I’m going to get so fired.” He stopped pacing, as he noticed the girls stepping out of the golden elevator, walking towards their marks for the normal punishment routine.
“Good morning girls!” Drake said, his eyes shifting around nervously, “So… at some point in the night… Howard decided to leave out of the blue!”
“No he didn’t,” Frankie butted in, clearly trying to keep her face in a neutral expression, “He stopped by my room before he left.”
“He did!” Drake shouted, bewildered at this revelation, “Why didn’t he tell anyone else on the crew?”
“Oh. You know Howard,” Frankie rolled her eyes, waving her hand as she explained, “he very rarely clues anyone other than his assistants in on his plans, and even then only the bare minimum for them to get by.”
“Yep. That sounds like Howard,” Drake muttered under his breathe, before asking, “Did he tell you why he was leaving? Or what we’re supposed to do about the punishment? Or the challenge this week?!”
“Well, he refused to give me a real reason for why he was leaving other than it was for some business he had scheduled before signing up for ANGA. As for punishments,” Frankie paused, an evil grin spreading across her face as she cracked her knuckles, “He said I was free to dole out the punishments as I saw fit.”
“Sticking to the theme voted by the audience at home, right?”
“…Yes,” Frankie said, squinting her eyes, “as long as I did that.”
“Well girls,” Frankie said, pulling out some tools out of her pockets that clearly could not have fit in them, “The punishment that the audience chose is rather ironic, because- Well, you girls will see,” she grinned, readying the tools in her hands: a chisel and a wooden mallet. “Let’s start with… Annette!”
Annette walked over to Frankie, who instructed her to stand still with her arms extended outwards. Frankie took the chisel, placing it in the crook of her armpit, and striking it with the mallet, after a few more strikes, Annette’s arm fell to the floor, shattering into a variety of pieces, the inside of which were made of white marble, rather than the muscles and bones one would have expected to be inside an arm. The point where her arm would have stuck was similarly composed of uneven chunks of white marble. Frankie walked over to her other arm, repeating the procedure before saying, “Ta da! The Venus De Annette!” Annette chuckled a little bit, causing Frankie to look at her oddly and ask, “What’s so funny?”
“Well, I actually took a form similar to this as part of one of my earlier acts,” Annette answered honestly.
“Really? Well, I guess I’ll just have to do some more to make sure it’s different,” Frankie placed the chisel on the top of her head, and angling it so that a slanted chunk of her head containing her left ear and her left eye fell to the floor, shattering into many small chunks of marble. She then had Annette lift up each leg, chiseling off her feet in a slightly more accurate method in order to make walking around on her stumps slightly less painful. “There! I hope that’s different enough. Maya’s next!”
Maya took over Annette’s place, and Frankie walked once around her before deciding what she wanted to do. After chiseling away her arms in a similar manner to Annette, Frankie placed the chisel directly below Maya’s breast, encircling her body once. She grabbed Maya’s upper half by her shoulders, and lifted her off of her former body. Using her foot, she pushed at it, and her body flopped backwards, producing major cracks in her now marble body. “What a wonderful Maya bust! Sinopia, could you hold her while I work on your sister?” Frankie passed over Maya to Sinopia, who was not expecting her to weigh just as much as a marble bust, causing her to almost drop her.
Sable took over the transformation spot. “Alright, unfortunately I think you drew the short straw, but I’m sure your sister would be willing to help you out.” Frankie took the chisel, aiming it directly at the center of Sable’s arm, and as she hit it, her entire arm shattered, the marble underneath having reshaped itself to match that of a bird’s wing. She repeated the step with the other arm, before placing the chisel at her neck, cutting her head off efficiently and tossing it onto the ground.
“Well, there’s that taken care of,” Frankie patted her hands together, sending marble dust everywhere as she put the tools back into her pockets.
“That’s great,” Drake said nervously, as Sable walked back to her spot, somehow still being able to see despite her missing head, “but that still doesn’t help us in what the girls are supposed to do for this week’s challenge now that their magician is gone?”
“As I said earlier,” Frankie said, finishing patting her hands as two stagehands started sweeping the former chunks of assistant into a magical waste bin, “Howard left me some instructions, and a bit of a challenge update.” From her pocket Frankie produced a brown envelope similar to the ones that the celebrity guests had been reading from all season. “He specifically asked that I do this part on the stage though, said it makes the whole thing more formal.”
Drake sighed, “Alright. Give us a few minutes and we’ll get everything set up.”
~~~
Rooftop Stage
Frankie walked out to center stage as the four contestants sat patiently in three seats (Sinopia holding Maya’s significantly reduced form in her lap). Frankie opened the envelope, and read off of it, “Hello girls! Sorry I couldn’t be there, but unfortunately this business matter I have to attend to is too important to try and reschedule. So, I decided instead to work around that limitation. Because there is the very real possibility that, in my growing age, I may be unable to make it to certain performances, I need to make sure that you all are skilled enough to teach my replacement the ropes of how to perform the trick perfectly, and at a moment’s notice. As such, your challenge will remain the same: Create and then perform the most complicated trick you feel you can handle. It’s simply who you will be working with that will be different and with some added time crunch to make the challenge more interesting.”
Frankie shook her head as she threw away the envelope, “Classic Howard. Wanting to pull a magician swap without telling anyone. He’s very lucky that I came prepared for just this occasion.” From her pockets she pulled out a large package that looked a bit like a parachute, the words ‘Emergency Magician Kit (4 pack)’ written on the front. She pulled out four, deflated, shapeless masses of varying colors, attached a little hose to each one, and began pumping up all four with the same bicycle pump.
As more air entered the lumps, it became more obvious that those shapeless lumps were the deflated form of four different girls, each one becoming more recognizable as their features unfurled. From left to right there appeared to be: a pale girl with dark brown hair tied into a ponytail; a slightly paler girl with lighter brown hair tied into two pigtails, a pair of glasses looking dangerously close to falling off of her flat face; a dark-skinned girl with crimson hair that almost covered her right eye; and a pale girl with frizzy, red hair. All four of the girls were wearing a form-hugging maroon shirt with the ‘Automagic Industries’ logo printed across the chest of the shirt, and a pair of black tights.
“Girls,” Frankie said after completely pumping up the girls she had unpacked, the girls suddenly becoming animate and stretching their bodies, “Allow me to introduce our Automagic Spokeswomen, and your magician’s for the rest of this challenge. Firstly, Julienne!” The frizzy red head took a step forward, giving a short curtsy, before getting back in line. “Trina!” The dark-skinned girl took a step forward, blowing some kisses into the air, before getting back in line. “Zoe!” The glasses wearing brunette walked forwards, waving her hand in the air before returning to the line. “And, last but certainly not least, Jessica!” The brunette with a ponytail stepped forwards, giving the girls a bow, and as she turned around to walk back to her spot, pulled out her cellphone, taking a quick picture of her on stage, the remaining contestants in the audience for her blog.
“Now, they might not be world-class magicians like Howard, but my girls have enough experience with magic to help you out with any trick you might want to pull off. Assignments will come out tomorrow, so for now, enjoy your punishments,” Frankie grinned, the curtain falling, signaling to the girls that they could leave.
~~~
Annette’s Room
“So… Remind me again why I’m taking care of you instead of that Bellhop guy that you’ve been hanging around with?” Annette asked, raising the one eyebrow she had left suspiciously. The two were hanging out in the field in Annette’s Room, Rocky running around energetically switching between forms, occasionally copying either Annette’s or Maya’s form to his strange, almost human form to get in some needed practice.
“Because I like hanging out with you?” Maya asked, giving her the biggest puppy dog eye she could muster.
“Maya, I’m pretty sure this is the first time you and I have spent any extended period of time alone together in the entire show,” Annette said dryly.
“…Fine! It’s because Dudley and I had a fight, and I really don’t want to see him right now,” Maya explained.
“What was the fight about?”
“I was telling him about how we went up to the floor that’s still in construction, but when I did he started freaking out. Then! After I explained everything, he seemed to get strangely certain that we were all imagining seeing that woman sink through the floor like a ghost.”
“That is really strange…” Annette said, if she had any arms, she would be rubbing her chin “You know, when I went to Howard, he acted similarly. Speaking of which, he was supposed to talk to you girls about seeing the ghost woman. Did he ever actually do that?”
“He never asked me!” Maya said, her eye going wide, “Do you think?-…”
“I wasn’t before… but you know, first there’s the creepy floor with no rooms on it, then there’s the ghost-like lady, and now the owner and staff of this hotel are trying to brush both of these discoveries away… There’s definitely something weird going on, and Howard and Dudley are both clearly in on it.” Annette grew more serious.
“But what are they trying to hide?” Maya asked.
“I don’t know… But I think that if we ever want to find out what they're hiding, we’re going to have to figure this out before Howard gets back,” Annette said gravely.
~~~
Sinopia’s and Sable’s Room
“Ha! Serves you right for being mean to me when I was just a head on Monday,” Sinopia said shortly after they got back to the room, sticking out her tongue.
Sable made a rude gesture towards her with her wings, pulling out her phone and placing it on the floor, she typed a message with a text-to-speech program with her feet, a skill she had picked up at some point back home. The program said robotically, “I might not have a head. But at least I have a brain. Tongue sticking out emoji.”
“Wow! Hurtful,” Sinopia said, placing her hand over her heart, “but at least I’m not made of stone!” Sinopia reached out running a finger over the area of Sable chest with exposed marble.
Sable backed away, using her stone wings to shield the area, as she the text-to-speech program robotically said., “Don’t do that. It feels super weird.”
“You mean this?” Sinopia said, moving Sable’s wings away so that she could reach the strange marble area again.
“Stop it.” The program got out, before Sable and Sinopia began running between the two bedrooms, Sable doing her best to protect herself, while Sinopia was doing her best to torture her slightly younger sister.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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