First Round (1)

Quickly, the other 4 all opened their slips of paper and were confused to see them with a empty black circle on them. "Whoever has a filled in circle please step forward, you're the lucky contestant for this side."

Aika sighed and stepped forward. When she had first seen here slip she had had a feeling this is what it would be and she had hoped otherwise, she would have rather made it to the finals on merit alone but she figured there was nothing she could do and this was fine too.

Seeing who stepped forward, Ezekiel smiled and nodded. "Alright, Aika. Since you're the first lucky one, you don't have to be here today if you don't want... though I recommend sticking around." After he finished speaking he waved his hand to return and pulled an unsealed envelope from his back pocket.

Ever since she had stepped forward, Aika had felt three sets of resentful and jealous gazes on her while Zachary surprisingly looked relieved. Deciding now wouldn't be a good time to ask him why he looked happy to not skip the first round, she shook her head at the other contestant's jealousy and gave her full attention to Ezekiel so she wouldn't miss anything important.

Opening the enveloped, he pulled 5 more folded slips of paper from it and tossed them in the hat carelessly. He turned to the side slightly to be fully facing the groups and spoke once again. "Alright, you know how this works now so I doubt I need to give you an explanation. Come get your slips, don't open them till the end, blah blah blah..."

Unsurprisingly, the group with Emma and the two unknown girls in it walked up first and haughtily took a piece of paper, acting as if the act itself was degrading. Following them was another group of 3 composed of three tall and muscular men with identical long hair trailing all the way down their backs.

As each group went, Aika couldn't help but notice that they all had some single unifying trait among the members. Emma's group was all rich and haughty in a way that makes them look like royalty, the group of 3 men all had the same hair, the duo after them had both had animal ear headbands on. Immediately, the fourth group walked up to the hat, this time being two girls wearing fully black dresses and clearly going for a Gothic vibe. Finally the last group went up and broke the trend. Unlike the other smaller groups, this one had six members who were all vastly different in appearance, height, and attitude.

Now that they all had their papers, they opened them and each group except for Emma's got excited looks on their faces and stared down like they had won the lottery. On the other hand, Emma's group all had gloomy faces for a moment before collecting themselves and going back to their prim and proper air.

Ezekiel smirked at the happiness on all the groups faces and once the moment seemed perfect cleared his throat. "I can tell you all seem extremely happy with your slips, but I hate to inform you that we decided that the winning slip for each group would be reversed. While in the singles it was the filled circle, for you all it's the empty one that wins." Though he said 'we', Ezekiel was smirking mentally. This hadn't been an official decision, but instead him wanting to mess with a bunch of newbies.

Emma turned to the other two girls in her group with a crunched face and called out, "Rose, Samantha... I guess we got lucky?"

"How is it lucky to get less time to show the world what we can do..?" Samantha glared at the piece of paper like it stole the world from her before sighing after several moments and pouting.

"Hey... can we give this to another team instead?" Rose picked up on what the other two were doing and waved around the slip obviously, making sure that the reporters could get good pictures.

Ezekiel pretended to think before shaking his head, "I'm afraid not, it's purely luck based." Despite saying that, internally he was looking at the group in front of him with a mix of disappointment and interest. 'It's their first competition and they're already taking advantage of reporters to get good publicity... and showing they're so confident in their own skills that they think they'll win either way.'

Emma sighed heavily and then looked at the other two before speaking hesitantly, "...Fine I guess we'll take it since we have to." Then, she turned to the other 4 teams and spoke earnestly with a smile on her face, "Good luck!"

"Okay then, time to get started. As I said earlier, those who got lucky can leave right now, but I recommend against it."