“Maybe I should quit,” Adah said.

  Rika burst out laughing and said, “But you finally got some fans!”

  “The wrong kind! They like me because they think I’m mean and cold-hearted. That’s not who I am!”

  “It’s not?” Rika joked, prompting Adah to punch her shoulder playfully.

  They sat together on the couch in the agency office, munching on some chips they’d snagged from the office’s kitchenette. One benefit of never having to host producers or investors was that the girls could turn the lobby into their de facto clubroom most days.

  After sleeping on her predicament, Adah felt like she needed a second opinion, so naturally she went to Rika. The two of them had joined the agency around the same time, back when Spotlight Sunbright still had a bit of a reputation as an up-and-coming group. Then the older girls who had moderate success retired, the new girls like Adah and Rika never gained traction, and—well—there was no need to reiterate the current sad state of affairs.

  “I don’t get it,” Rika said. “Why not lean into it? You could pass me in FP soon enough.”

  Rika—better known as Shining Lyrika—was the most popular of the girls at their agency, though it wasn’t really for her work as a magical girl. She ran a video channel where she uploaded covers of songs from other magical girls.

  The “magical music” market was one of the more popular ways for magical girls to grow and engage their fanbases. Certain agencies even specialized in producing teams that acted more like pop idols than superheroes. Through good looks, catchy songs, and a bit of charm, these girls could build passionate fanbases that boosted their FP to sky-high levels. With that much magic at their disposal, it didn’t matter if they were less trained in combat than a traditional magical girl. They could overcome dangerous missions through sheer firepower.

  In Adah’s opinion, Rika had the talent and looks to make it as one of those magical idols, but there was a different reason she’d wound up at a generalist agency like Sunbright. In the girl’s own words: performing in front of a live audience felt like having her save file wiped. The skills she’d developed through years of practice, the confidence she felt while recording in her room, even her voice itself—all of it vanished when she was put on the spot.

  If the idols were pop stars who fought Cruelties on the side, Rika was more like a solider who sang on the side. As two girls whose dreams were indefinitely delayed, she and Adah got along just fine.

  “And by ‘lean into it,’” Adah said, “you mean be a rude and angry magical girl?”

  Rika chuckled again and said, “Yeah, be a bitch. It made you popular enough to unlock a new spell out of nowhere, so why not? Become someone new, not Sparkling Starbloom. Get a new transformation and change your name to ‘Ice Princess Merciless’ or something!”

  She took some of Adah’s hair and brought it across her face to imitate a black mask. Her piercing green eyes stood out all the brighter against the dark lock of hair. One of the first things Adah had noticed when she met Rika was the way her eyes commanded your attention. When she looked at you, those eyes shocked you upright, as if she’d grabbed you by the hair. At this close a distance, it was sometimes hard to maintain eye contact very long—at least for Adah.

  “‘Merciless?’” Adah said, glancing away. “The only one suffering under that name will be me.”

  “Something else then,” Rika said with a shrug. “If it were me, I’d jump on it. Finding a breakthrough in this industry is nothing short of a miracle.”

  That much was self-evident. It had taken four years for Adah to get any kind of attention, and when she finally did it had been purely accidental. It being accidental was actually part of the problem. This surge in fans had nothing to do with the way she usually presented her Sparking Starbloom identity. She was unlikely to retain these fans, nevermind gain new ones, if she stuck to her usual activities. But what was she supposed to do instead?

  Adah had hoped this conversation might provide an answer to that question, but she and Rika were cut short by the arrival of Grace and a man she must have rescued from a stranded island. His hair was cut haphazardly, as if he’d done it himself with a sharpened stone, and his face was covered in equally unkempt stubble. The dark bags under his eyes and his lazy posture suggested he had never slept in a proper bed a single day in his life.

  In reality, this was just Spotlight Sunbright’s owner and producer, Michel. Far from being a castaway, this was his typical appearance.

  “Are the twins here?” Grace demanded.

  Her tone implied the rest of her message: “If they are, go get them.” So Adah nodded and hurried upstairs to rouse Ami and Emi from their rooms. Once all four girls had gathered in the lobby, Grace shoved Michel in front of them and pressed him with an expectant glare.

  He smiled at them and rubbed the back of his head as he stalled for time. Eventually, the pressure from Grace grew heavy and he cleared his throat.

  “So, hmm… Where to begin?” he dragged his words out, delaying every possible microsecond. “Well, long story short: we’re going out of business.”

  The producer punctuated his declaration with a clap and then scanned the faces of the four girls in front of him.

  Naturally, they all burst into a ear-bursting cacophony of complaints, questions, and expletives. The man just scratched his hair, rubbed the bags under his eyes, and put a cigarette between his lips.

  “What the hell do you mean?!” Adah yelled as she shook him by his shoulders.

  He brushed his wild bangs out of his eyes and picked up the cigarette that her shaking had caused to fall to the floor.

  “Thing is,” he started, “we’ve been in the red for a while, ya know? So I’ve been paying the rent on this place mostly out of pocket, but…”

  Although he didn’t look the part nowadays, their producer used to be a fairly successful model and B-list actor. He had made enough money and connections during his youth to get Spotlight Sunbright off the ground, but he was far from a businessman. This whole operation was just a passion project and the price of passion was steep.

  “But now you’re going broke,” Adah finished the part he was unwilling to say.

  “Something like that,” he confirmed.

  Hell broke loose again.

  “I don’t wanna get a real job!”

  “Sell your kidney, Producer.”

  “Sell both!”

  Michel pulled out a lighter and desperately tried to strike it, only to have it snatched away and get smacked on the head by Grace for trying to smoke in the office. He picked up his fallen cigarette—again.

  “Look, we’re not closing shop yet. But given the way things have been going,” he said while looking across the four girls, “I wanted to give everyone a heads up.”

  “How long are we talking about here?” Grace asked.

  “Barring a miracle? Maybe a month.”

  Partly to discuss the finer details and partly to escape the onslaught of questions from the four girls, Michel and Grace retreated to the agency’s meeting room through a door behind Grace’s desk. The girls commiserated as a group a while longer until the twins went outside to cool their heads, leaving Adah and Rika sitting in those rarely-used lobby chairs.

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” Rika said. “The universe got tired of waiting for me to quit on my own so now it’s showing me the door. I guess it’s time to go back to my mom’s, wait tables, and figure out what to do next.”

  She pulled her knees up to her chin, hiding most of her face except those bright eyes. She gazed around the room absentmindedly.

  “It’s probably the end of the line for me, too,” Adah said. “What other agency is going to want to pick up a failed magical girl when they could get someone new?”

  Rika’s eyes suddenly fixated on her. No matter how long they’d known each other, being looked at by eyes that carried such intensity was still disarming for Adah.

  “Maybe it’s the end for Sparkling Starbloom, but what about your alter ego?”

  “You’re still talking about that?”

  Rika got up and walked over to Adah’s chair. She looked down at Adah with a serious expression.

  “What do you have to lose? If this dump only has a month left, why not take a risk? As for me, I’d like to see at least one of us succeed.”

  Rika finished her words with a yawn and turned away, starting to pace aimlessly around the room.

  At least one of them, huh?

  With the two of them alone like this, Adah couldn’t help but think about their first days at the agency. As soon as they met, they’d rushed outside to show off their transformations and compare designs. The older girls teased them for being innocent newbies, but they were just happy to have someone else to share their excitement with. They’d talked for hours during those early days about all the cool spells and weapons they’d soon unlock, the cringey catchphrases that wouldn’t be so cringey if you said them after defeating a massive Cruelty, and every other dream they had for the future.

  In the end, neither of them ever got popular enough to unlock the ability to conjure a weapon or take on the toughest Cruelties. Out of every moment that seemed like their opportunity to make a name for themselves—tagging along on bigger missions with the established girls, getting a call from this or that producer, seeing a surge of positive comments online—not a single one crystallized into a dream they could seize with their own hands. Those chances were just blips on a timeline of four years that seemed to drag on and on. They were memories that soon soured, and each begged the question: would a different girl have come out of it all successful?

  Still, there were moments that remained in Adah’s heart untattered—plenty of them after Ami and Emi joined. There were late nights after Grace had gone home, when the four of them stayed up and wasted the night away in this empty lobby. They’d just talk about nothing, probably wake up half the neighborhood on a midnight trip to the convenience store, eventually pass out in these chairs and get reprimanded by Grace the next morning. Maybe whoever bought this building next would actually put the room to its proper use.

  Adah cleared her throat and rubbed her eyes. Not that she was crying over an office building or anything.

  But it was sad.

  At no point had being a magical girl been glamorous. Izzy got under her skin more than any human ever could; and she would make more money ringing people out at a grocery store; and when she looked at the gap between herself and other girls her age, she wanted to lock herself in her room until the maggots cleaned the flesh off her bones.

  But did she want to give up? If she was really okay with calling it quits, why hadn’t she already? All the embarrassment and anger and pain hadn’t pushed her over the edge before, so why now? It could only be because a convenient excuse had shown up—something she could blame other than herself.

  It wasn’t what she wanted.

  If her career as a magical girl was coming to a close, why not try something new? Take a leap of faith and lean into it, like Rika said. There was at least one way she could still be like a true magical girl: to fight until the sun set, to try and find some hint of beauty in this failed dream. Even if it didn’t work out, even if it hurt, she could still try. She’d been given another chance, so she would embrace it and the triumph or pain that came with it.

  “Twilight Heartbreak,” Adah said.

  Rika, who had been staring listlessly out a window, turned around and tilted her head.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  Adah pulled out her phone and opened the Magiapp.

  “She’s the magical girl who is going to save this agency.”

  ☆   ☆   ☆

  Rebranding when you had so few fans was easy. The only contract Adah had to consider was her employment with Spotlight Sunbright, and they weren’t exactly in a position to put up any resistance. When she ran into the meeting room where Michel and Grace were planning out the company’s off-ramp and announced her grand idea, Michel merely shrugged.

  “Maybe you’ll be our miracle,” he said.

  Grace required a bit more explanation, if only because she knew of Adah’s love for cute and mannered magical girls like Pureheart. However, her stats didn’t lie, and the agency hadn’t seen FP growth like hers in years. If she had any hope of ever making it as a magical girl, this was it.

  “You’ll need a new transformation,” Grace said once she’d accepted the proposal. “Do you plan on designing it yourself again?”

  “Ah, well,” Adah stammered a bit while looking downwards and scratching her neck. “I may already have something that could work.”

  “What from?” Grace asked. “Didn’t you only come up with this Twilight Heartbreak idea now?”

  “It was just, like, art practice from a while back.”

  It definitely wasn’t a character design based on fanfiction she had written back in middle school. The story definitely didn’t involve a wicked villainess who was eventually defeated by Magical Pureheart Chu, only to be forgiven and grow into a fan of magical girls, finally fighting against evil in her own way, hoping to catch the eye and love of the hero who had once saved her from her own sins. Adah definitely wouldn’t be deleting all evidence of this nonexistent story as soon as Izzy engraved the design into his magic essence.

  “In that case,” Grace brought Adah back to reality, “you’re all set. I just want to ask one last question. Maybe this is getting ahead of things, but it’s important for you to consider. If it does work out, and you do become popular with this new persona, will you be okay with that?”

  She looked at Adah intently, her gaze overwhelming even through the slight glare on her glasses. It was a kind of pressure Adah had never felt from her before.

  “I mean… yeah, I think so,” she answered, unsure what to make of the question. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “I’m just saying, when you’re a nobody, you can reinvent yourself as many times as you want. But if you find success, you won’t be able to turn around and be a different kind of magical girl anymore. You’ll be known as Twilight Heartbreak until the end. Having fans, learning new magic, doing work that actually helps people—I know you became a magical girl for those reasons. I’m just not sure they were the only reasons.”

  “This certainly isn’t the direction I thought my career would go,” Adah said. “But however this change ends up, I think the only thing that would make me truly sad is never finding out for myself. However I might feel about this new identity, I’d definitely be sadder if I was a magical girl who just gave up.”

  Grace revealed a tiny grin—a rare sight indeed—and said, “You’ve got my support then. I’ll be with you until this washed-up womanizer runs out of cash.”

  Their producer squinted at the finger she pointed at him. “Washed-up?” he repeated.

  “That’s not the part that should bother you, idiot,” Grace said, elbowing him in the gut.

  With matters settled, Rika crept into the room and hugged Adah around her shoulders from behind. Of course, she had been spying on the whole thing, her eyes peeping past the edge of the doorway like she was in a cartoon.

  “Congrats, Heartbreak,” she said teasingly. “I’ll be rooting for you, too. If you save this place, maybe I can pretend to be a magical girl a little longer myself.”

  Adah squirmed around in Rika’s embrace in order to give her a proper hug back. When they broke apart, she pushed the other girl gently.

  “What do you mean ‘pretend?’ You’re the realest one we’ve got.”

  “Not for long,” Rika said back with a wink. “You’ve got me all inspired now. Gotta work hard so I don’t fall behind.”

  “There’s no such thing as falling behind,” Adah said. “All four of us are a team, right?”

  “I guess that’s true. All the same, if you’re working hard, I can’t afford to waste any time either. Time to find out what Lyrika’s worth.”

  Rika’s face fell in a way Adah had never seen before, but she left for her room before Adah could say anything more. Neither of them had any time to waste—that was true. It probably had been from the very start, even if none of them realized it. However, now there was no denying that deadline looming a month away.

  She had to get to work. The transformation design she mentioned could surely use a few tweaks before she handed it over to Izzy, and she would have to update her identity in the Magiapp and across her social profiles as well. Then there probably ought to be some kind of announcement; she actually had some fans now, after all.

  Tomorrow would be her second first day as a magical girl.