Keeping Sendai's Kids Safe: Tres Magia Safety Instructional

[Kinathis]

The BanBanTV building smelled of fresh paint and ambition — two scents that clung to everything in Sendai's Media District like perfume on a first date. Studio A on the fourth floor had been transformed overnight from its usual concert stage into something resembling a middle school science lab designed by someone who'd only ever seen one in a fever dream: workbenches at odd angles, test tube racks stuffed with liquids in colors that didn't exist in nature, and a pegboard wall of safety goggles arranged by size, from "toddler" to "absurd." Fluorescent tube lights hummed overhead in that particular frequency that made teeth itch, while three camera rigs on wheeled dollies circled the set like hungry sharks awaiting blood in the water.

Magia Magenta arrived first, as she always did, because punctuality was the one battle she never lost.

Magenta bounced through the studio doors in full magical girl regalia — the bubblegum-pink dress with its white trim, the thigh-high boots, the forearm-length gloves — all of it partially concealed beneath a bright pink lab coat that someone in wardrobe had clearly custom-ordered for the occasion. The coat was a shade too vivid to be clinical, more "cotton candy at a carnival" than "serious researcher," and it billowed behind her as she spun on her heel to take in the set with wide, glittering eyes.

"This is amazing!" she breathed, pressing her palms together beneath her chin. Her drill curls bobbed as she turned, catching the overhead lights and scattering pink reflections across the nearest camera lens. "It looks like a real laboratory! Do you think they'll let me keep the goggles after?"

The makeup artist — a patient woman with a tool belt of brushes and a weary expression that suggested she'd worked with celebrities far less enthusiastic — reached up to dust setting powder along Magenta's jawline. Magenta, mid-practice of what she'd mentally titled her "Responsible Safety Smile Number Three," jerked her head at exactly the wrong moment. The brush dragged a pale streak through her right drill curl, leaving a ghostly stripe of translucent powder nestled among the pink like frost on a rose petal.

"Oh no — sorry! Did I — is that —" Magenta pawed at her hair, succeeding only in spreading the powder further. The makeup artist sighed the sigh of a woman who had signed up for this knowing full well what she was getting into.

"Leave it," the woman muttered, already reaching for a different brush. "We'll fix it in touch-ups."

Magenta beamed at her, undeterred, and resumed practicing her smile in the reflection of a dormant monitor — adjusting the angle of her chin, the width of her grin, the precise degree of tooth-to-lip ratio that communicated "trustworthy authority figure" rather than "girl who once ate an entire cake meant for a school fundraiser and had to remake it." The monitor's dark screen showed her a warped, greenish version of herself, but Magenta didn't seem to notice. She was too busy being delighted by the sheer fact of being here.

Inside, her thoughts hummed a different frequency. This was good. This was what being a hero was supposed to feel like — not the sick, shaking terror of that jewelry store, not the weight of a gun barrel in her memory, but this: standing in a brightly lit room, about to teach children something that might keep them safe. Simple. Clean. No one would get hurt today. She was grateful that Vatz had arranged this for them.

Sulfur arrived twelve minutes later, which was technically on time but felt spiritually late. Magia Sulfur's bright yellow magical girl outfit — the short hoop skirt, the polished thigh-high boots, the fitted arm gloves — looked almost aggressive beneath the canary-yellow lab coat someone had wrestled onto her. She wore it like a punishment, arms crossed so tightly over her chest that the fabric strained at the shoulders, her expression suggesting she was one wrong word throwing something.

"Community service," she muttered, the words dropping from her lips like stones into still water. "They're callin' this a community service opportunity. Like I'm doin' hours for breakin' a window or somethin'."

She slouched against the nearest workbench — this one outfitted with a mounted handsaw, clamps, and a neat row of wood blocks — and glared at the storyboard propped on its easel near Camera One. The illustrated panels showed stick-figure versions of the three of them demonstrating goggle use in various scenarios: chemistry, woodworking, scientific research. Someone had drawn tiny hearts around Magenta's stick figure. Someone else had drawn tiny flames around Sulfur's.

"Who drew this?" Sulfur demanded of no one in particular, jabbing a gloved finger at the flaming stick figure. "Is that supposed to be me? I don't look like that. My hair's way better than that."

But her sky-blue eyes lingered on the storyboard a beat too long, and something in her expression softened — just slightly, just around the edges — when she read the header: "Keeping Sendai's Kids Safe: A Tres Magia Guide to Eye Protection." Kids. Safety. The two words that could crack Sulfur's armor faster than any villain's attack, though she'd sooner eat her own boots than admit it.

Azul arrived precisely on schedule, which meant she had been waiting in the hallway for four minutes to avoid appearing overeager. Magia Azul's teal-colored dress and thigh-high boots were immaculate beneath her pale blue lab coat, which she wore buttoned to the collar with the kind of effortless grace that made the garment look like it belonged on a runway rather than a television set. Her long teal hair flowed down her back in a straight waterfall, not a strand displaced, and her cherry-red eyes surveyed the studio with calm assessment.

She knelt beside the test tube rack at her demonstration station — a sleek arrangement of beakers, pipettes, a UV lamp, and several sealed vials of what appeared to be glitter suspended in clear solution — and withdrew the script from a folder she'd brought in her bag. Her lips moved silently as she reviewed the talking points, one slender finger tracing the lines with the same deliberate focus she brought to calligraphy at the shrine.

Around them, the studio churned with the particular energy of women under deadline. A lighting technician adjusted the key light above Magenta's chemistry station, cursing softly when the gel filter slipped. The camera operator for Dolly Two ran a focus check, the lens whirring as it hunted for sharpness across the scattered test tubes and power tools. A production assistant with a clipboard materialized beside each girl in rapid succession, confirming mic levels and offering water bottles that went largely ignored. The sound engineer tested levels, her headphones clamped over a severe bun, fingers dancing across a mixing board that looked like it could launch satellites.

The director — a compact woman in her forties with cropped hair and reading glasses perpetually perched at the tip of her nose — clapped her hands twice, sharp as gunshots.

"Places, girls! We're burning daylight and studio time, and I've got a cooking segment at three that needs this space. Magenta, Station One — chemistry demo. Sulfur, Station Two — workshop safety. Azul, Station Three — scientific precision." She consulted her clipboard, flipped a page, and consulted it again. "And for the love of everything, stick to the script. This is educational content. We're teaching children, not performing improv."

Sulfur's eyes narrowed with the particular gleam of someone who had just been told not to do something and was now absolutely going to do it.

Magenta practically skipped to her station, the powder-streaked drill curl bouncing jauntily. Azul rose from her kneeling position in one fluid motion, tucking the script into her lab coat pocket with a serene nod. Sulfur peeled herself off the workbench with the theatrical reluctance of a cat being removed from a warm spot, shuffling to her station with all the enthusiasm of a funeral procession.

Three girls. Three stations. Three lab coats in pink, yellow, and blue.

The cameras hummed to life, their red recording lights blinking on like tiny, watchful eyes.

"And... action!"

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The first take belonged to Magenta, because the director had learned — through a brief but informative exchange with BanBanTV's talent coordinator — that Magenta's enthusiasm was a force best deployed early, before it had time to compound interest and become something approaching a natural disaster.

"Okay!" Magenta chirped, turning to Camera One with a smile so bright it threatened to blow out the white balance. She held up a pair of safety goggles in one hand — clear-lensed, pink-rimmed, because of course they were — and gestured grandly toward her workstation with the other. Two beakers sat before her, one filled with a cobalt-blue liquid, the other with something viscously orange. Both had been prepared by the show's science consultant, a stern woman in a turtleneck who had already pulled Magenta aside twice to explain that "enthusiastic pouring" was not a recognized laboratory technique.

"When you're working with chemicals," Magenta announced, her voice pitched to that particular register she used for civilians — warm, clear, the verbal equivalent of a sunlit meadow — "the most important thing you can do is protect your eyes! Chemical splashes can happen super fast, even when you're being careful." She snapped the goggles over her face with a decisive thwack, adjusting them until they sat slightly crooked on her nose. The powder streak in her drill curl caught the key light. "Safety goggles create a barrier between you and any unexpected reactions. Like this!"

She lifted both beakers with the solemn ceremony of a priest raising the chalice and poured them into a mixing flask in one smooth, confident motion.

The reaction was immediate and spectacular. A low *boom* resonated through the studio — not quite an explosion, but definitely more than a fizz — and a geyser of thick, neon-purple goo erupted from the flask like a volcanic sneeze. It splattered across Magenta's face shield in a viscous curtain, dripped down her chin onto her pink lab coat, and sent a secondary spray across the workbench that caught the edge of Camera One's lens.

The crew flinched. The sound engineer yanked her headphones off one ear. The science consultant covered her eyes with both hands.

Magenta, her face shield now opaque with purple slime, turned back to the camera. Her grin was visible even through the goo — wide, genuine, absolutely untroubled.

"See?" she said brightly, purple dripping from her goggles in slow, viscous rivulets. "Without goggles, that would have gone right in my eyes! Always wear eye protection when handling chemicals, even if you think nothing will happen. Because sometimes—" She gestured at herself, at the purple catastrophe coating her from hairline to collar. "—things happen!"

Behind Camera Two, the production assistant bit her own clipboard to keep from laughing. The director stared, glasses slowly sliding down her nose, and said nothing for a full three seconds before muttering, "...we can use that. Moving on. Sulfur, you're up."

Sulfur approached her workstation the way a cat approaches bathwater — with visible reluctance and an air of barely suppressed outrage. The handsaw sat bolted to the workbench, its blade clean and gleaming under the overhead light, surrounded by a neat arrangement of wood blocks, clamps, and a push stick that the safety consultant had labeled with a hand-drawn arrow reading "USE THIS."

"Right," Sulfur said flatly, snapping her goggles on with one hand. They sat slightly askew over her sky-blue eyes, the yellow rims clashing with her golden hair in a way that made her look less like a safety spokesperson and more like a very small, very angry bumblebee. "So when you're workin' with power tools—" She glanced down at the cue card taped to the workbench, squinting. "—you gotta wear safety goggles to protect your eyes from debris, sawdust, and... flying particulates." The last two words came out like she was pronouncing a foreign language badly and resenting every syllable. "Just put the goggles on girls. It ain't hard."

She positioned a wood block in the clamp, set the push stick, and engaged the saw. The blade whirred to life with a high mechanical whine that filled the studio, and Sulfur guided the block through the cut with surprising steadiness, her small hands firm and sure despite her earlier complaints. The sawdust sprayed in a fine golden fan, catching the light like confetti.

Then the wood grain caught.

The block kicked back with a sharp *crack* — not part of the script, not planned, not remotely within anyone's control — and a splinter the size of a pencil stub launched directly at Sulfur's face. It struck the left lens of her goggles with a precise, audible *tink* and ricocheted harmlessly onto the floor.

Silence.

Sulfur stood perfectly still, saw blade still spinning, sawdust settling on her yellow lab coat like pollen. Her eyes — visible even through the slightly scratched goggle lens — had gone very wide. She looked down at the splinter on the floor. She looked at the camera. She looked at the goggles still sitting on her face, the left lens now bearing a small, star-shaped scuff mark where the wood had struck.

"...Huh," she said, and for the first time that morning, there was no sarcasm in her voice. Just a genuine, slightly startled respect. She tapped the goggle lens with one fingernail, the plastic clicking under her touch, before she pointed at the camera. "Yeah, okay. Wear the goggles, kids. For real."

The authenticity of the moment — the flicker of actual danger, the split-second save — landed harder than any scripted line could have. Even the director leaned forward slightly, glasses catching the light. The camera operator on Dolly One gave a quiet thumbs-up from behind her viewfinder.

Azul's turn arrived like a change in weather — the energy of the studio shifting from chaotic to tranquil as Magia Azul stepped into her light. Her blue lab coat was buttoned precisely, her teal hair drawn over one shoulder in a way that exposed the elegant line of her neck, and her cherry-red eyes regarded the camera with the serene focus of someone who had spent years performing rituals far more complex than a television demonstration.

"During scientific experiments," she began, her voice carrying the measured cadence of temple bells at dusk, "ultraviolet light can cause serious damage to unprotected eyes." She lifted a pair of UV-filtering goggles — tinted blue, naturally — and placed them over her eyes with the careful deliberation of a priestess donning a ceremonial mask. "Proper eye protection ensures that you can observe your results safely."

She positioned a series of pipettes beneath the UV lamp and switched it on. The light hummed to life — a soft, purple glow that painted her station in otherworldly tones and caught the edges of her teal hair like foxfire. With one hand, she lifted a sealed vial of clear solution, broke the seal with a clean twist, and tipped it into the waiting beaker with a precision that made the motion look choreographed.

The liquid hit the beaker and *bloomed* — a silent eruption of iridescent glitter that fountained upward, caught the UV light, and scattered across the station in a cascade of shimmering particles. It looked like someone had bottled starlight and uncorked it. The glitter drifted down like slow snow, settling on Azul's lab coat, her hair, her gloved hands, and the workbench around her in a thin, sparkling layer.

Through it all, her composed smile never wavered. Not a blink, not a flinch, not a single hair out of place. She turned to the camera with glitter dusting her cheekbones like some celestial blessing, and said, in her gentle, unhurried way: "Always protect your eyes. What is beautiful can still be harmful."

The crew stared. One of the lighting technicians whispered, "How is she real?" to the woman beside her, who had no answer.

The director lowered her clipboard. "...Perfect. One take. Moving on to the group segment."

-------------------------

The group segment was supposed to be the easy part — three girls, three stools, one shared message about the importance of protective eyewear delivered directly to camera in the kind of measured, responsible tone that made school principals weep with gratitude. The script called for thirty seconds of unified sincerity. What it got was Sulfur Tenkawa, bored out of her mind and in possession of a functioning imagination.

It started small. The director had barely called "action" on the transition shot when Sulfur slid off her stool with the liquid nonchalance of someone who had decided, in the deepest chambers of her heart, that the script was a suggestion and nothing more. She wandered to the edge of the set where a stack of textbooks had been arranged as set dressing — thick volumes on chemistry, physics, and biology with colorful spines designed to read well on camera — and snatched a pair of goggles from the pegboard wall.

"Hey, you know what else can splash?" she said, not bothering to check if the cameras were following her. They were. They always did — Sulfur moved through a room the way a lit match moved through a dark forest, impossible to ignore. She shoved the goggles onto the top textbook, adjusting them until they sat at a rakish angle across the spine. "Homework. Homework totally splashes."

She produced a pen from somewhere — possibly her own pocket, possibly stolen from the production assistant's clipboard — uncapped it, and flicked a spray of blue ink at the goggle-wearing textbook stack. The ink spattered across the clear lenses in a constellation of tiny dots.

"See?" Sulfur declared, turning to face Camera One with the satisfied expression of someone who had just proved a mathematical theorem. "When homework splashes, goggles are your friend. Science fact."

The director's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Her clipboard trembled in her grip.

"Wait — Sulfur, that is not in the —"

But the damage was done, because Magenta had caught the scent of improv like a hunting dog catches a rabbit, and there was no calling her back.

"Oh! Oh! What about spicy ramen?" Magenta bounced to her feet, drill curls swinging, the powder streak in her hair now joined by a faint residue of dried purple goo along her jaw that makeup hadn't quite managed to eliminate. Her green eyes were electric with the particular manic glee that preceded her worst ideas. "Goggles for spicy ramen! When you slurp too hard and the broth goes —" She mimed an explosion with both hands, complete with sound effects. "*Psshhhh!* — right in your face!"

She grabbed an oversized pair of goggles from the pegboard — comically large, meant for the set's comedic background rather than actual use — and spun around, searching for a volunteer. Her gaze landed on a stuffed penguin that had been sitting on a shelf above Azul's station, part of BanBanTV's collection of mascot props from previous segments.

"Here!" Magenta seized the penguin with both hands, cradling it like a newborn before pressing the enormous goggles onto its plush face. The elastic band caught on its beak, creating an effect that was less "safety demonstration" and more "penguin in witness protection." "Underwater safety! Penguins need goggles too! They swim in the ocean and everything!"

She held the penguin up to Camera Two with the solemn gravity of a nature documentary host presenting a rare specimen. The stuffed animal's beady black eyes stared out from behind the oversized lenses with an expression of profound existential confusion.

A sound escaped the dolly operator — a strangled, nasal noise that was clearly a laugh being murdered in its crib. The production assistant had her face buried in her clipboard. The sound engineer's shoulders shook silently, her mixing board forgotten.

The director made a sound like a teakettle.

Through all of this, Azul had remained at her station, script in hand, composure intact. She had weathered Sulfur's textbook goggles with the serene patience of a woman accustomed to chaos. She had endured the penguin with nothing more than a slight deepening of her gentle smile, the kind of expression that said "I love these idiots" in the language of micro-expressions and divine forbearance.

She was preparing to deliver her scripted transition line — something about laboratory best practices — when Magenta appeared at her elbow.

"Azul! Azul, look!" Magenta held up a tiny pair of safety goggles, the smallest on the pegboard, designed for the child-sized demonstration mannequin that hadn't made it into the final set design. "Your plant needs protection too!"

Before Azul could respond, Magenta reached past her and carefully, tenderly, lovingly secured the miniature goggles onto the small potted fern sitting at the corner of Azul's workstation. The goggles perched on the fronds like a crown, the elastic band tucked beneath the pot's rim, and the effect was so absurd — so genuinely, impossibly ridiculous — that something in Azul's carefully maintained composure simply gave way.

It started as a tremor at the corner of her lips. Then a soft exhale through her nose. Then — and the crew would later swear they had witnessed a minor miracle — Magia Azul laughed.

Not the polite, measured chuckle she deployed at public events. Not the composed smile-and-nod that served as her social armor. A real laugh — warm and musical and slightly breathless, the kind that crinkled her cherry-red eyes at the corners and made her press one gloved hand to her mouth as if she could catch the sound and stuff it back inside. Her shoulders shook. A second giggle escaped between her fingers, higher than the first, and then she was gone, laughing openly with her head tilted back and her teal hair swaying and the glitter from her earlier demonstration catching the light across her cheekbones like scattered stars.

Magenta stared, delighted. Sulfur stared, smirking. The crew stared, collectively charmed.

The director stared at the ceiling for a long moment, as if consulting a higher power, then lowered her gaze and said, with the resigned calm of a woman who had chosen her battles and lost this one: "Final shot. All three of you. Stools. Now. Give me the catchphrase, and then we are done."

The girls assembled — Magenta in the center, Sulfur on her left, Azul on her right. They sat shoulder to shoulder, three lab coats in pink and yellow and blue, three pairs of safety goggles pushed up onto their foreheads like crowns. Magenta's drill curls still bore their powder streak. Sulfur's left goggle lens still showed its star-shaped scuff. Azul's cheeks still sparkled with residual glitter.

They looked, in that moment, less like the city's celebrated defenders and more like what they actually were: three teenage girls having the time of their lives.

The director pointed. The cameras focused. The red lights blinked.

"Remember, kids!" they said in unison, voices overlapping in a harmony that was somehow both perfectly synchronized and wonderfully imperfect — Magenta too loud, Sulfur too flat, Azul too soft, and all of it exactly right. "Goggles are the hard hat of the eyes!"

A beat.

Sulfur leaned forward, eyes finding the camera with the particular gleam of someone about to commit a small, beautiful crime.

"Don't be an eyeball dummy!" she added, one corner of her mouth lifting into a smirk so sharp it could have cut glass.

The director shouted "Cut!" in a voice that contained multitudes — exasperation, surrender, and something that might, under laboratory conditions, have been identified as affection.

The crew applauded.

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No one at BanBanTV expected the PSA to trend. The segment had been scheduled for a Tuesday afternoon timeslot — the media equivalent of being buried alive — sandwiched between a rerun of a regional cooking show and a ten-minute feature on Sendai's municipal recycling program. The station's social media coordinator uploaded it to their official channel as an afterthought, tagged it with the bare minimum of hashtags, and went to lunch.

By Thursday, the video had six hundred thousand views. By Friday, "Don't be an eyeball dummy" had become the most repeated phrase in every elementary school within a fifty-kilometer radius of the City of Trees.

It began on the playgrounds.

At Tsutsujigaoka Park, a cluster of second-graders had constructed an elaborate game that bore only a passing resemblance to the PSA's actual content. Two girls in matching raincoats stood atop the jungle gym, wearing plastic safety goggles — one pair neon green, the other electric orange — and hurled handfuls of sand at imaginary "chemical splashes" while a third girl on the ground shouted commands in a pitch-perfect imitation of Sulfur's flat Kansai drawl. "When homework splashes," she bellowed, whipping a notebook through the air like a frisbee, "goggles are your friend!"

Across the park, a girl in oversized goggles pulled down to her chin was chasing her sister with a juice box, yelling "Spicy ramen attack! Spicy ramen attack!" while she shrieked and dodged behind a bench. Their mother, sitting nearby with a thermos and a newspaper, watched with the expression of someone who had stopped trying to understand her children approximately three years ago.

The phrase traveled like wildfire through Sendai's school system, mutating and multiplying at the speed of childhood imagination. Teachers reported hearing it in hallways, during lunch, shouted across gymnasium floors during dodgeball games. One kindergarten class had collectively decided that "eyeball dummy" was the worst insult in the Japanese language and wielded it with devastating frequency during recess disputes. A particularly creative fifth-grade class had choreographed an entire dance routine set to the catchphrase, complete with synchronized goggle-donning that they performed during their school's morning assembly to thunderous applause from the student body and polite bewilderment from the faculty.

The retail impact followed within days.

Iwamoto Optics, a modest laboratory supply shop on Jozenji-dori Avenue, was the first to notice. The owner — a quiet woman who had spent twenty-three years selling precision instruments to hospitals and universities — found herself staring at an empty display rack where her stock of color-block safety goggles had sat for the better part of a decade, gathering dust and fading in the sun. They had sold out overnight. Not to researchers. Not to students. To parents.

"My daughter wants the pink ones," a harried woman explained at the counter, her child tugging insistently at her hand. "Like Magia Magenta's. She won't go to science class without them."

The shop owner blinked. Blinked again. Then placed a rush order for two hundred units and hand-wrote a sign for the window: "SOLD OUT: Color-Block Safety Goggles. Restock Expected Monday." She taped it to the glass beside a small printout of the PSA's thumbnail — three magical girls in lab coats, grinning through various states of goo, sawdust, and glitter.

Similar signs bloomed in storefronts across the city like flowers after rain. Hardware stores in the Aoba-ku district reported unprecedented demand for workshop safety equipment. The home improvement center near Sendai Station moved its entire goggle display to the front entrance and sold through three shipments in a week. An online retailer released a limited-edition "Tres Magia Safety Set" — three pairs of goggles in pink, yellow, and blue, packaged with a sticker sheet and a card reading "Don't be an eyeball dummy!" — and crashed their own server within the first hour.

The professionals noticed last, because professionals were always the last to notice what children had already decided was important.

Dr. Sugimoto, a chemistry instructor at Tohoku University's undergraduate program, walked into her Tuesday morning lab section to find every single student already wearing safety goggles. This was unprecedented. In twelve years of teaching, she had never once begun a class without having to remind at least four students to put on their eye protection. She had prepared her usual lecture on laboratory safety protocol, complete with graphic photographs of chemical burns and a PowerPoint slide titled "Your Eyes Cannot Be Replaced." None of it was necessary. Her students sat at their benches, goggles firmly in place — several in colors that did not appear in any scientific supply catalogue — and waited for instruction with the eager attentiveness of people who had recently been told, by someone they actually listened to, that goggles mattered.

Dr. Sugimoto set down her notes. She looked at her class. She looked at the rainbow of goggle frames staring back at her.

"Well," she said. "That's a first."

In a woodworking studio in Izumi Ward, a workshop instructor named Hara found herself in a similar situation. Her adult education class — twelve women ranging from university students to retirees — had arrived for their Thursday session already wearing eye protection. One woman in her sixties sported a pair of yellow-rimmed goggles and, when asked, cheerfully explained that her granddaughter had insisted she wear them because "Sulfur-chan says so."

Hara, who had spent the last decade begging her students to follow basic safety protocols, stared at the woman for a long moment, then at the rest of the class, then at the ceiling.

"I should have hired magical girls years ago," she muttered, and moved on to the lesson.

The final confirmation came in the quiet moments between obligation and rest — in break rooms and waiting areas and the thirty-second gaps between tasks — when Sendai's working women pulled out their phones and found the PSA in their feeds. A dentist watched it between patients, her expression shifting from clinical curiosity to a smile she tried and failed to suppress when Magenta turned to the camera covered in purple goo and said, with absolute conviction, "Always wear eye protection!" An engineer on the Namboku Line watched it on her commute, snorting quietly at Sulfur's grudging endorsement of the goggles that had saved her eye. A researcher at the Sendai Mediatheque watched it three times, not for the safety content, but because Azul's glitter demonstration was, in her professional opinion, "genuinely elegant chemistry."

None of them could have articulated exactly why it worked. The production values were modest. The script had clearly been abandoned midway through filming. One of the presenters had visibly been covered in slime for the duration of the segment. The entire thing had the polished professionalism of a school play and approximately the same budget.

But there was something in it — in Magenta's irrepressible grin through the purple goo, in Sulfur's startled respect when the goggles caught the splinter, in Azul's genuine laughter breaking through her composure like sunlight through clouds — that no amount of professional polish could have manufactured. Something real, something warm, something that reminded every viewer why they'd believed in heroes in the first place.

Three girls in lab coats, laughing too hard, caring too much, and accidentally teaching an entire city that safety equipment was, against all odds, actually kind of cool.

Don't be an eyeball dummy.

Sendai, it seemed, had taken the lesson to heart.