Emi looked over the spreadsheet Seb was showing her, trying her best to make sense of all the numbers and color-coding. The boy’s entire laptop screen was filled up with data, even at a zoomed out view, so Emi felt her eyes glaze over as she tried to parse it all. Luckily, Seb started walking her through it.

  “This tab is all the engagement from the blog,” he said. “I don’t usually write about just one of you, but I’ve bolded the few posts that are only about you or where I’d say you’re the main focus. You can see views, comments, backlinks—I pulled just about everything, but the blog has a limited readership. Outside of a few special cases, like when we announced the Last Light, views always stay proportional to the blog’s subscriber count.”

  “It’s mostly the same people reading,” Emi summarized.

  “Right, and the people that read the blog read everything,” Seb confirmed. “That was basically what I expected. Only dedicated fans check out content like this, and the level of engagement only tells you if you’ve written something really cool or really boring. Anything in-between just gets an average number of views and comments. Still, you can’t be sure until you look at the data, so I put it together. What’s more interesting is your social media.”

  While Adah went to visit Ketzia—a trip that she insisted would go more smoothly if she went alone—Emi had asked Seb to help her answer some questions. She knew Ami had to be right about at least some of what she had said during their battle against the spider Cruelty. Something about Emi’s efforts as a magical girl was appealing to fans in a different way than any of her teammates. The growth in her FP and the intensity of the Rally Force proved that, and the sincerity of Ami’s feelings maybe told part of the story of how those fans had grown invested in her.

  Yet, she still couldn’t understand it. Emi hadn’t released a song like Adah and Rika had. She didn’t have the charm of Iris or the flashy personality of Ami. She rarely shared photos of herself and her other posts tended to be random observations about the world. Stuff like: They really matched the colors to flavors well when it comes to red and white onions. Her feed looked nothing like most other magical girls. Although she’d been focusing more on how she presented herself in combat, that couldn’t explain all of the growth she’d been seeing either.

  If she didn’t understand why her fans supported her, how could she come up with a good plan to gain more?

  When she had talked to Seb about this, he’d suggested taking a closer look at the reality of her online presence. By looking at the data, they might discover a hint that could help her lean into what was working for her.

  The two of them gathered in the agency lobby on this quiet day, with Rika and Ami away testing out their augmentations on a lower-ranked Cruelty and Grace out running errands, to review the data Seb had compiled. Since everyone else was out, Emi had turned down the heat in the building and let more of the cold air seep in. She preferred the lower temperature, especially when she could wrap herself in a blanket on the couch like this.

  As Seb switched to the tab on which he’d arranged the reporting for her social accounts, Emi asked him, “Are you cold? We can share.”

  “Thank you, but I’m okay,” he said with a smile. “I don’t mind the cold, and the laptop’s heating me up, too.”

  He was dressed on the warmer side, as well. When Adah had first invited him to the agency a few months back, he had seemed to have a different style—graphic tees and not much else. Lately, he’d been coming to the office with collared shirts or light flannels like the green one he had on today. Maybe because he was officially employed by the agency now, he was dressing a bit more professionally. Sitting side by side like this, Emi noticed he had even combed his hair neater.

  He turned his laptop toward Emi again and said, “From this, we can actually start drawing some conclusions, or at least some theories. Some of this I had assumed, but it’s nice to have proof. For example, all your posts get a baseline number of likes. You’ve got a core contingent of fans who will show up no matter what you post, and it’s more than just the Rally Force diehards. You’re also immune to bad posts.”

  “Bad posts?”

  “Or let’s call them ‘posts that shouldn’t work,’” Seb said, pointing at a cell in the corner of the spreadsheet. “Take this one. All you posted was: Tired. If Adah had put that up, it would’ve been dead in the water. People don’t want Heartbreak to post something like that, and it can even harm her follower count if she does it too much. But look what happened for you. You wrote one word and it’s your third most liked and commented post last month.”

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  Emi remembered making that post. She had thought it was weird how many people had commented telling her to rest up or take it easy on herself, but at the time she’d been too tired to make much of it.

  “What does that mean for me?” she asked. “Make more bad posts?”

  Seb laughed and shook his head. He zoomed in on a different part of the spreadsheet.

  “No, not at all,” he said, a hint of laughter pitching up his voice. “I think you’re just a natural idol.”

  “Natural?” she repeated. “I don’t think so at all.”

  “Well, hear me out,” Seb said. “I’m going to get a little nerdy here, but there’s a theory among magical girl fans. There are natural idols—or magical girls—and genius idols. The geniuses seem to understand how to make themselves shine in a supernatural way, whether because they’ve practiced it or their brain works differently or whatever. It shows up in the way they sing part of a song or a face they make in a photograph—they do something completely unexpected that ends up working perfectly. One way or another, they’ve figured out some secret about presenting themselves to the world. Don’t tell Adah I said this, but there’s no doubt Iris falls under this category.”

  “So ‘genius’ is another word for sociopath,” Emi said.

  “Maybe a lot of them are,” Seb said. “But you can be a genius and be nicer than Iris. Either way, it’s definitely a calculated performance. Like running a brilliant play in basketball.”

  “Then a natural idol does the same thing without a script,” Emi said. “I still don’t think that fits me.”

  “No, it’s not the same at all,” Seb rushed to say, his energy spiked now that he was nerding out over one of his passions. “That’s what’s so amazing about it. A natural idol is idol-like no matter what they do. Goofy faces, messing up their choreography, lame jokes that you’d normally never laugh at—all of it somehow becomes endearing.”

  “So a natural idol can get away with doing stuff that isn’t cute?” Emi asked.

  “When a natural does it, that means it is cute,” Seb said.

  “By definition?”

  “Exactly.”

  Emi felt like they were replaying a conversation she had heard elsewhere, but she ignored the thought for now.

  “Magical girl fans are strange,” she said. “Even if you think I’m a natural, what should I do with that info?”

  “You might not need to do as much as you think,” Seb said. “That’s the point. You might not need to think about who Raindrop is in the same way Adah thinks about who Heartbreak is. You’re already a magnet. What you need to think about instead is the task in front of you. If you can give everything you’ve got to everything you do as Raindrop—like you did with the lynx Cruelty, like you and Ami did with the spider—then the parts of you that the fans love will naturally come to the foreground.”

  Emi shed her blanket off her shoulders. Even she was getting warm now, despite wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts. She let the blanket keep her legs toasty, but the cold air of the lobby soothed the skin of her exposed shoulders and collar.

  “I need to treat everything like a battle then,” she said. “How do I do that with next week’s photoshoot? I could punch Ami.”

  “If you two start brawling, you’ll probably ruin those outfits,” Seb said.

  Emi shrugged and said, “If I ask her, she’ll let me get one shot in for free.”

  “She’ll let you get a freebie because she’ll get you back in the stomach later,” Seb said. “I guess I did just say anything you do will end up being cute, but maybe you should still hold back a little bit. That aside, have you thought about the photoshoot at all?”

  Emi had thought about it, or rather tortured herself over it. She wanted to come prepared with ideas so that this shoot wouldn’t wind up like the IndieMagie one had. She didn’t want to be directed around by someone else the whole time, like she was just another part of the set instead of a proper model. The more she tried to plan for the shoot, though, the less comfortable she felt with it.

  A natural idol didn’t need to plan, according to Seb. But if she didn’t plan, then Emi would end up doing nothing at all. Even if he genuinely believed she was some kind of natural, she still didn’t see it.

  Emi must have let some of these thoughts show on her face, as Seb spoke up again.

  “Didn’t Lina tell Ami she had some kind of breakthrough with you two? That you’ll see yourselves like you’ve never seen yourselves before,” he said. “Maybe once you see whatever changes she’s made to your costume, you’ll have your own spark of inspiration.”

  Lina certainly seemed to think about magical girls in a different way than anyone Emi had met before. She was kind of like Ami, except instead of saying a whole bunch of nonsense all at once, the woman would ramble about ideas that probably made sense to her but no one else.

  Emi was sure Lina understood something about their team, though. When she saw the outfits Lina had designed for Adah, the designer’s rambling had started to make more sense. Adah’s outfit had recovered a part of her personality that Adah herself had lost in her switch to Twilight Heartbreak. Lina had seen that there was an innocent, starry-eyed girl beneath Heartbreak’s outer shell, and had brought it to the foreground through those clothes. When Emi looked at herself in the mirror next week, maybe she’d discover something about herself as well.

  Though, it wouldn’t hurt to have a second opinion.

  “When I’m wearing the new outfit,” she said to Seb, “will you tell me what you think of it?”

  He stared at her a moment, then opened his mouth without saying anything. After a pause, he smiled and glanced downward, like he was resetting his thoughts.

  “Sure I will,” he said. “And you might have a more natural instinct for why people like you than you think.”

  For all the data he’d shown her, Emi still had a hard time understanding what Seb meant. But if he believed she was some kind of natural idol, she would trust him.

  He hadn’t, after all, said the same about Ami, Adah, or anyone else.

  Rather than a battle against the camera, perhaps this photoshoot would be a battle against her own doubts.

  and the chapters of this story flying by without me noticing...