Chapter 45: Seeded
The next day, Aika arrived at precisely 8:00am like she had been told to do in the email from Golden Stars congratulating her the night before. When she got there, she saw that she was the last one to arrive and got some funny looks from everyone else. The rest of the official contestants had arrived by 7:30 at the latest and the reporters and newfound fans had been there since at least 7am to get their spots at the front. There wasn't many fans as even though the performances the day before could be considered impressive, there weren't that many people who would go wait outside just to see a new potential idol or idol group.
Despite the lack of fans, there were hordes of reporters as they all hoped to get exclusive interviews with people beforehand so that if they placed well they could release it and not have to jump through a ton of hoops just to place the interview. Thus, most new reporters had scurried out as early as they could stand to just for the small chance of landing the interview that would rocket their careers to the stars.
One unfortunate reporter had been forced to the back of the crowd and was about to give up and head home for the day when he saw Aika's arrival. He rushed over to her and arrived first by taking advantage of his position at the back. Before he was able to speak to her, she turned him down automatically. "I'm really sorry, I need to go, it's almost time for it to begin."
Aika rather quickly walked away from the reporter, somewhat uncomfortable with having a camera shoved in her face. Even though she had grown up as the child of two very powerful people, they had taken advantage of that power to hide her relation to them from the media and general public so only people of equal power and wealth knew who she was and she had managed to live a somewhat calm life.
When she got to the same place as the rest of the contestants, Zachary immediately walked over to her and waved, his nervousness from the previous day gone. "Aika! I thought you weren't going to show up, everyone else was here so early..."
"I'm on time!" She was honestly somewhat embarrassed at being the last to arrive, but it wasn't her fault that she didn't arrive early so she refused to show it. Right as she had been about to leave her parents house on time to arrive around 7:30 and have plenty of spare time, Aria had spent ages wishing her luck and then saying bye for the day and she had barely made it on time.
Soon, the same man from the day before, Ezekiel, walked out from the front doors and cleared his throat to get everyone's attention. This time, Aika found herself examining him and noted curiously that he had the same auburn hair and green eyes as Zachary. That was where the similarities ended, though. Where Zachary was the cute and sweet looking type, Ezekiel's eyes looked like they were full of disdain and he had tattoos covering what was visible of his arms. On top of that, his face was far more rigid and mature looking than Zachary's.
Since the similarities were so few, Aika simply mentally shrugged and ignored it. Anyone could have auburn hair and green eyes and other than that, the two were nothing alike.
"This year, we chose to only take 100 contestants who wanted to enter the official competition and had hopes that it would raise the bar of those who applied and we would select a larger percentage than usual. Sadly, we actually got less than usual and now have a small problem in that we have odd numbers in both categories. The staff at Golden Stars who manage the Newpark Competition thought long and hard about what to do and have decided to randomly pass one person from each category on past the first round. The other 4 contestants will then compete and the winning two will move on to the finals with the initial contestant. As you all likely know, the finals are determined on 0-100 scores, so the results will simply be based on that."
After speaking, he held out an upside down top hat with 5 slips of paper inside it. "We'll start with individuals, come select a slip."
Each contestant walked up and grabbed a folded slip of paper. Once they all had slips of paper, Ezekiel stared at them waiting and sighed when he saw that they weren't opening the papers. He couldn't help but think that every year they got dumber and dumber. Before he was able to cast them all off as idiots, he saw that unlike what he had initially thought, the girl he had met yesterday had already opened her slip and was staring at the rest with the same look on her face as his own.
"Well, Open them already. We don't have all day."
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