Kaja Lando February 22nd,20XX

The harsh bubbles of the hot tub attacked my skin and slightly hurt, but that was part of the enjoyment. A harsh pounding echoed from the heavy wooden door to the bathroom, but I ignored it and took great pleasure in doing so.

“Kaja, you’ve been in there for three hours! Get out!”

“I thought you didn’t care about the hot tub?”

I couldn’t help but poke at his earlier comment, but I got out as I did. He was right; I had been in here a bit too long and I was getting dizzy. Maybe jumping into the tub the second Joyce had run off to where ever she’d gone hadn’t been a great idea.

“Seriously Kaja, I’m not coming in there to save you if you faint!”

He dodged my attempt to pick a fight, and I heard his footsteps thud away from the door and back into his room. I didn’t even know what he’d been doing for the past three hours, but it was entertaining enough for him to let me hog the bathroom for as long as I had.

More out of spite than any sense of enjoyment, I sank back into the hot tub and waved my limbs around in the scalding water again. I relished the sensation of my skin being lightly scalded and casually thought back to a week ago.

A week ago, I’d cried in relief when I’d snuck into a gym and had gotten to take a hot shower for the first time in months. The person I’d been a week ago couldn’t ever have imagined getting an entire bathtub to myself. Or well, I had to share with Tillo, but he wasn’t big on luxury items like this.

It all felt like a dream, but even if it was, I wasn’t interested in waking up. Whatever reality was like, how could it possibly compare to this now?

I had superpowers! And because of those, I got more privileged than most people would ever dream of. A fancy building and living suite? Free food? A career being built for me? I was in heaven!

As well, I got to interact regularly with Aaron Cyrus and Joyce knightly! Who knew? Maybe I would get to meet other celebrities as I hung around them.

I grabbed my phone from the rim of the tub and quickly logged into Squire. My message box was full, but I immediately scrolled to the top and clicked on a group chat.

The group chat had started back in middle school when a few friends and I had begun our fangirling journey. There were only four of us in it, but I wouldn’t have gotten as far as I had without them.

There was Vanessa, who currently went to one of the most influential schools in the country. She was close friends with the popular kids so she could get info on the up-and-coming superstars at her school. The one she paid the most attention to was this kid named Jake Addams. He was handsome enough and had a kind personality, but I could tell that his company was trying to push him as a knock off Aaron Cyrus.

While I could see the similarities, the comparison was only harmful to him. Vanessa seemed pretty invested in him though, so I would put up a monthly Jake appreciation post. That was enough to placate her for now, but I wouldn’t know what to do if she pushed for more.

Next was Niki. Her sister was a real estate agent in a wealthy part of town, so she got to tag along to her networking parties as an assistant and pick up sensitive information. Since it was only information about celebrities, most of them weren’t too concerned about sharing gossip.

And the last was Addie. Addie was a godly writer that could take all the half-completed information we brought and make it readable. She’d used to be in charge of actively updating the account as well, but ever since we’d hit highschool she had gotten busier so the job had fallen to me.

My job was to monitor the celebrities’ social media presence, and as I had with Aaron’s video, find topics for us to investigate. I also had to sort through the ‘leads’ submitted by our followers and chase down any I thought were interesting enough.

Of course, as the semi-professional celebrity news account that we were, we would never ‘expose’ things like relationships without the artist’s consent, but I wasn’t above hinting at it and letting our followers figure it out.

I skimmed through the article Addie had put together and got to writing up a post about it. While Addie had created the actual article, I needed to find the most eye-catching lines to quote on the post promoting it. I also needed to tag the related celebrity accounts.

As the most tech-savvy of all of us, I ran almost all aspects of the account and website itself, although Nikki would often volunteer her help.

Not to brag or anything, but we were a pretty big account and could boast a following of about thirty thousand. It wasn’t the biggest account in the world, but it was very sizable for an account run by a bunch of teenage girls.

We’d gotten a few advertising offers, but those would have required us to reveal our true identities as the curators of the account. Despite Vanessa’s vehement protests that it made little sense for us to hide our identities, I and Addie knew better.

Revealing our identities would be a double-edged sword, with the sharpest end aimed at our necks. There was a certain amount of trust we’d earned through anonymity, but that would go down the drain when people found out we were a bunch of unassociated teenage girls.

A big power would likely pick us up as their attraction of the month and then dump us as has-beens once they found a more interesting topic. Besides, I didn’t do it for the fame; I did it because it was fun. I’d also needed something more interesting than ‘dance’ to take up my attention.

There was only so much ‘movement with intent’ that one could do in the background before getting bored.

The banging on the door resumed again.

“One Second! I’m coming out!”

“Aaron and Joyce are back! Hurry so we can do the tour!”

I jumped out of the tub and quickly got dressed. Taking a bath was cool and all, but there was no way I was missing the tour. From the way Joyce had looked when she’d mentioned it, I got the feeling that there was a lot more to this place than a gym and a free cafeteria.