The contestants were woken up by their own internal alarm clocks. For the first time all season, there was no voice commanding them to awaken and get a start on the day. All of them either had a confused or concerned look on their face, but eventually it dawned on them that with Howard gone, things were probably going to be ran a bit differently around the hotel.
~~~
Dining Room
Unsure of where to really go, the girls slowly ambled into the dining room to grab breakfast, all four ironically getting into the elevator one after the other until they reached their group destination. When the girls arrived, they spotted Frankie and the magicians she had brought in for their updated challenge. The five of them were sitting at a single table, Frankie having pulled up a chair so that she could sit at the head of the table. As the other girls approached, Frankie said, “Hey! Come sit with us!” and her spokeswomen got up, pulling the table across from Frankie so that all nine of them could eat at a single table.
The girls hesitated for a moment, not used to the invitation to grab a meal together with their potential boss. “C’mon girls. I promise they don’t bite,” Frankie grinned, “Well… at least when I tell them not to.” The girls looked at each other, before shrugging and sitting down with them.
The girls ate in relative silence, before Frankie said, “Girls… You might as well at least attempt to make some conversation with us. After all, how else are you supposed to form a good enough bond in two days to perform an amazing magic trick on Saturday?” When the girls still remained silent, Frankie said, “How about some icebreakers then? Let’s do names and first magical experience. I’ll start. Obviously, my name is Frankie, and my first major experience with magic happened quite a while ago. I used to work as a photographer for some of my friends who were magicians in helping them get some promo stuff set up. One of my friends asked if they could borrow my head and transform it so that it looked like their head box had produced a second head, and I said sure! It was amazing to have my head cut off for the first time, and from there things sort of escalated to what they are today. We’ll just go counter clockwise around the table, so Jessica, you’re next.”
“Well sure! Hi girls, I’m Jessica, or Jess if you want. If you’ve seen Automagic’s Modern Art series of short films, those were basically a sort of reimagining of some of my first couple of magical experiences with my friends back home, retold with professional magic users. Obviously, in real life the series of events didn’t really happen one after the other in a growing twist of events, and instead happened over several transformation sessions. But that very first one, where I tried out a variation on a zigzag cabinet and my legs gained a mind of their own? That’s more or less exactly what happened. Thankfully, I had some friends around when it happened to catch them, because otherwise I don’t know if I’d still have all of my original parts today.”
Next up was the fiery redhead, who said, “Hey girls! I’m Julienne, but you all can call me JJ. I can’t remember what my first experience with magic was… but I definitely remember it happened when Jess got herself stuck trying out some new toy she had bought off the internet.”
“You probably don’t remember it because it was an enchanted knife that disconnected feeling from the parts you cut. When you fixed me, you had the bright idea of chopping off your head, and then your body liked it so much that it wouldn’t let me reconnect your head. It’s a bit hard to form memories when you don’t have a brain to store them in,” Jess laughed, eliciting some more laughs from the other girls at the table.
Next up was Annette, who said, “Hey y’all. My name’s Annette. My first magical experience was with my Grandpa. He used to be a rodeo magician, and would perform magic tricks while riding on bulls. He used to levitate me around the room so that I could fly around with our birds.”
“Oh yeah. Your family are beast tamers, right?” Zoe asked, adjusting her glasses slightly.
“Yep! Some of the best in the US!”
“I used to have an uncle who was a beast tamer,” Zoe explained, “He used to really anger my mom, because he’d bring over some baby sabertooths anytime he’d come over.”
“Wait… Sabertooths?” Annette paled slightly, “baby sabertooth tigers are extremely aggressive… No wonder you mom would get mad!” The other girls at the table laughed.
When the laughter died down enough, Maya introduced herself, “Hey everyone! I’m Maya! And obviously, I’m a Monoeye,” She pointed at her one large eye, “So… obviously my first experience with magic was probably the pair of enchanted glasses my parents gave me which allowed me to live a mostly normal childhood. But that’s rather boring, so instead my first magical experience when I came out to my friends about being a Monoeye was to magic them up into Monoeyes and go out to the bars with them as my real self a few months before I openly revealed I was a nonhuman.”
“That’s so sweet,” Jessica said, “it sounds like you have some really great friends back home.”
“Yeah,” Maya smiled, reminiscing on some of the other great times she had with her friends last summer.
Next up was Sable, and when all of the eyes of the other people at the table turned to her, she froze a little bit. The other contestants, remembering her issues with shyness, looked away slightly. Sable swallowed, knowing that she would have to get better at this if she wanted to reach her goal of performing at the end of the week with her own face. “H-hello! My name is Sable! And magic is pretty normal in my family… so I don’t really remember my first experience with magic… although it probably had something to do with one of my sister’s stealing a part from me…”
Sinopia went next, not waiting long after to finish to say, “I’m Sinopia! I’m Sable’s older twin sister. Fraternal obviously. Sable’s right that our family uses magic a lot. The earliest magic thing I firmly remember is how our dad used to pull a quarter out from behind my ear!”
The table sat in silence, everyone wondering who was going to have to break the news to Sinopia that what her dad had done was probably not magic. Eventually Sable said, “Sin… I’m pretty sure that’s just a parlor trick… Not a magic trick.”
“It was too a magic trick! He even taught me how to do it! Watch!” She reached out to Sable’s ear, and pulled out a little piece of silver from behind her ear. She placed the coin on the table in a spot everyone could see it, revealing that the coin had a perfect impression of Sinopia’s winking face on it, eliciting some claps from around the table.
“Alright. My turn now,” the dark-skinned assistant grinned said, “My name’s Trina. My first magical experience happened back when everyone was doing the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. Jess and some of my other friends had been gradually upping the stakes, so naturally I had to try and one up them. So, I had a friend cut my head off and did the challenge headless. And then, Jess dumped my head in ice water because she thought doing the challenge headless was cheating!” She gave an evil eye to Jessica
“Oh my God! I remember that!” Jessica said, “And it totally was cheating! The whole point of it was to raise awareness to how ALS affects the brain! If you’re not soaking your head, you’re missing the whole point!” The two argued a bit more back and forth, before Frankie cut them off so that the last magician at the table to could give her introduction.
“Hello, I’m Zoe,” the brunette girl with pigtails readjusted her glasses, “I actually was a magic performance major in college because I really loved exploring the different forms that were possible with magic, but I really started to pick up on it back in high school when I was on my school’s enchanted volleyball league. My head was actually rated best ball two years in a row,” Zoe grinned.
After Zoe had finished, the food appeared, and the girls dug in. The girls continued to talk while they ate breakfast, and even stuck around for a little bit longer after they had all finished to keep talking, Frankie’s icebreakers a complete success in beginning to foster a budding familiarity between the contestants and their new magicians.
However, before they left, Frankie quickly announced, “Alright girls. You’re free to talk to any of us to ask for advice, but you should probably only talk to your respective magician for performance planning purposes. Before we split up for the day, here’s the assignments I’ve decided on: Sinopia with JJ, Sable with Trina, Maya with Jess, and Annette with Zoe. Feel free to schedule out your rehearsals as you see fit, but remember that the show is this Saturday. I wish you all the best of luck, and if you need me, I’ll be in my bedroom,” Frankie stood up, the other contestants shortly following behind her.
~~~
Annette’s Rehearsal
“So, this is the famous unknown beast?” Zoe asked, kneeling down in order to take a better look at Rocky, who was currently in one of his many dog forms, black tongue lulling out its mouth.
“Yep! This is Rocky!” Annette beamed with pride.
“Fascinating,” Zoe said, she tried poking her index finger at Rocky on several points on his body, Rocky starting to elicit some annoyed growls as she did so. When the finger came by his face, Rocky took his chance, lashing out and biting off the offending digit, morphing her hand slightly to make it look natural that she only had four digits.
“Oh my! I’m so sorry! Rocky! Spit that out!” Annette commanded. Rocky complied, spitting the finger out onto the floor.
Zoe picked up the digit, holding it in her four fingered hand, commenting, “Amazing!”
“Oh wait! I didn’t realize that Rocky changed your hand too! Here! I’ll have him fix it! Rocky! Fix her!” Annette was in panic mode, not wanting to scare her magician away from working with her beast.
“You know, Rocky really seems to go against everything we know about magic,” Zoe commented calmly, allowing Rocky to swallow her hand whole for the purpose of fixing it, “It’s mostly considered fact in most academic circles that beasts are not able to perform magic due to not having magic reserves and magic requiring enough cognitive ability to know how to cast them… and yet Rocky seems to have both of these things,” Rocky opened his mouth, allowing Zoe to take out her hand and begin petting the strange black creature. “If you’ve got the time, I’d absolutely love the chance to just play around with him for a bit. Get a sense of what he can and can’t do.”
“Sure!” Annette grinned, glad that Zoe had taken to her friend, “Just as long as I can play with y’all.”
~~~
Maya’s Rehearsal
“So, I seem to be much better at performing the actual transformation part of the tricks, but I’m still really struggling with the restoration part at the end,” Maya explained to Jess.
“We could always try leaving out some of the restoration stuff,” Jess offered, “If we solely focus on moving the trick towards a more transformed end goal, without returning you to normal at the end.”
“But the whole point of the challenge is to challenge ourselves. Besides, not being able to restore myself would be pretty counterproductive for an assistant who has to be performed on by multiple tricks in a night.”
“Well, you said that you improved in being able to perform tricks, so for today, how about we focus exclusively on improving your restoration abilities? What did you do to get better at performing magic?”
“Well, a contestant who got kicked off taught me to create props, and that really helped me focus on what I need to accomplish in order to activate the magic.”
“Alright,” Jess walked over to one of the panels on the wall, turning it into a cabinet, the prop she wanted inside. She handed the crystal ball over to Maya and instructed, “Just like with the other props you’ve designed, make this crystal ball restore you to your base form anytime you touch it.”
“O-Okay!” Maya closed her eye, imaging her body, how she looked on a regular basis, with extra emphasis on remembering her one large eye. When she opened it, the crystal ball was now swirling with green clouds, the faintest outline of her prop logo visible through it.
“Great!” Jess said, touching another panel and pulling out a samurai sword, “Now lets start changing you until you can turn back on your own.”
~~~
Sable’s Rehearsal
“H-Hello, Trina,” Sable said nervously to the girl.
“So, I’ve heard you have a bit of a shyness problem?” Trina asked.
“Y-yes. But my goal is to perform a trick, as myself this week,” Sable said, gaining confidence as she got through her sentence.
“Well, that’s a nice goal to have, but unless you’ve got the trick to back it up, I don’t think just walking out on stage will be enough.”
“Oh trust me,” Sable grinned, “I think I have some ideas.”
~~~
Sinopia’s Rehearsal
“Alright Julienne. Do you have any good stretching or magic prepping techniques to get ready before rehearsal?” Sinopia asked.
“Firstly, feel free to call me JJ. Sec-.”
“But why? Julienne is a lovely name,” Sinopia interrupted, tilting her head to the side in a questioning manner.
“Well… It’s a lot shorter and less formal…” JJ said, looking at the completely blank stare that Sinopia was giving her, before sighing “and I guess you can call me Julienne if you really want to.”
“Great!”
“Secondly. I’m actually a little new to the whole, performing stage magic thing. I only joined the company as a spokeswoman a couple of years ago, and even then I haven’t really done that many appearances…”
“Well… That just means we’ll have to give it twice as much effort to make sure that our performance is the best of the night!” Sinopia said resolutely.
~~~
Incomplete Floor
After briefly stopping by Sable and Sinopia’s Room to inform them of the strange behavior of the hotel staff, the four girls had made their way once more to the incomplete floor, where Annette explained her plan. “So… We know that at some point, the woman in white came to this floor, and the dining room floor. Now, the dining room floor closes access to us after a certain point, but it seems like this floor is still open to all guests. At least it probably will until Howard comes back and watches the playback and realizes what we’ve been doing since he’s gone. So, that’s why we have to act tonight. Sable, did you prepare the potions I asked you to make?”
“Yep! Got them right here,” Sable pulled out four vials of a white colored liquid, “I actually got Sinopia to snag some of our marbled bodies from our punishment yesterday, so they should be extra potent,” Sable handed a vial to each of the three other girls.
“Okay. This potion should petrify us and turn us into completely aware statues. There are four hallways, and four of us, so we’ll each be stationed at one end of the hallway and looking towards someone else. Now, we don’t know if the staff is in on this conspiracy, but they won’t know about this plan until at least tomorrow, assuming someone else on the staff is watching the tapes. So, make sure to disguise yourself before you petrify yourself. Got it?”
“Yep!” all of the other girls said, making their way to their respective corner and transforming their look into some disguises, before drinking the potion down. As their bodies solidified, their clothing and hair began taking on the same marbled sheen, allowing them to keep an impressive amount of detail in their pure white bodies.
~~~
Several Hours Later
One of the pros of this potion, Annette was quick to realize, was that while they were aware, if nothing was happening, time seemed to move by extremely quickly, because it had only felt like a couple of minutes when the doors to the Golden Elevator opened once more.
Annette watched in horror, as out from the door walked a familiar tiny blue man in a bellhop uniform. He was pushing a cart with what looked like room service based on the silver plate cover on top. From the elevator, he walked several steps towards Annette, making her worry that he might see the sudden appearance of several marble statues in this hallway as a sign that something is wrong. But whether he didn’t notice her, or did and thought she was a simple statue was not clear, as he stopped pushing the cart, turned towards the wall and tapped on it several times in a funky rhythm that Annette quickly memorized.
From out of the wall, a door handle suddenly appeared, and with a single twist the wall paper bent inwards, a swathe of light brightening the hallway, before disappearing. After a few minutes, the wallpaper door once again open, and Dudley made his way back to the Golden Elevator, whistling a tune as he disappeared, leaving the girls just simple statues in the dark.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
& Question Corner &
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To Jess, Zoe, JJ, and Trina: “Hopefully you've had some time with the contestants before you see this, so it'd be a good opportunity to ask your thoughts on them. What do you think about them, and their abilities as assistants, so far?” -@@WanderTones
Jess: Well, overall, from the initial breakfast we had, I think they seem to all be competent enough.
Zoe: They’re magic reserves seem to be at a pretty good level too, considering that they’ll probably be getting stronger by the end of the competition. Well… Except for that one girl.
JJ: Hey! At least she has the right attitude and ambition! I think that if she can pull her act together, she might stand a chance of winning this round.
Jess: Anyways. As for my one-on-one time with Maya. She seems really nice, but still seems unsure of her own ability. I’m not doubting that her genetics are probably hindering her a little bit, but I fear that she might still be partially internalizing the idea that nonhumans aren’t able to do magic, when she’s shown multiple times that this is clearly the contrary.
Trina: I’m having similar issues with Sable. She’s working hard on it, but it feels like a part of her is telling her to not just enjoy the thrill of performing magic in front of others. Which is strange, because I’ve seen the tapes of her two other performances, and she seems to really enjoy it.
Zoe: Interacting with Rocky, I’ve found him to be just as adorable as the times I saw him on TV. Annette seems to have a good sense of timing and some imaginative ideas on how to use Rocky as well, so I think she could probably make it well as an assistant if she really wanted to.
To Contestants: “Versatility is one thing that's necessary to become an assistant, but one thing I've learned with magic is that it's good to specialise. It helps define you in the magic community, and is a reliable basis for building a stage persona. Frankie is an expert at detachments and enchanting, I've focused on anatomical polymorphing, Jean is an extremely capable mentalist, and I've heard Kairi has excellent magical and physical endurance. What would you say are each of your specialities? What type of magic are you most interested in, or you think most define you?” -@@WanderTones
Annette: Well, I’d say that my specialties are beasts. maybe I could be like the Bindi Irwin of magic! Ooh! Just think! I could have Phoenix’s flying in to greet the crowd, followed by some magic with Rocky, then moving on to showing off a dangerous beast or two. Maybe get them involved in a trick somehow, like a daring escape trick over a bit of fire eels! I know Howard says that he doesn’t work with animals, but I think with my guiding hand, maybe he could learn to love them?
Maya: I’ve actually really enjoyed my time enchanting stuff! I’m starting to think that if I lose this competition, maybe it would be a good idea to try getting some woodworking or smithing skills and start designing my own line of props!
Sable: Well. My whole family is rather adept at NBM. In fact, I know that Ron used to complain about her joints being way too loose. I’d say I’m probably much better at it than Sin, because I’m willing to try branching out into the other parts of NBM past just the detachment magic, like adding or subtracting limbs, maybe giving them some elasticity, or changing its consistency.
Sinopia: Could I say that where I’m best at is the personality department? Because I know that Sable’s going to say that she’s good at NBM, which she’s much better at than I am (although I’m still pretty good), but I’m actually able to hold up a conversation on stage. Really, I don’t have much experience with magic other than this show… So I guess I could say I enjoyed the flattening magic and hammer space stuff I tried out?