week when the final three face off! Only one can be the American Hero.
Who it will be is anyone’s guess.
Keep on the lookout for this week’s confessions:
Dragon Huntress, the Amazing Bubbles, Spasm, and Stuntman!
Confessional: Rachel Weinstein aka Dragon Huntress
The thing is, we had actually got good at it by now. It was like in Dragonflight, my favorite book in the whole world, and it’s like we were one of the five missing Weyrs that Lessa had to go four hundred turns between to find—we were all veterans, we’d been through the fire, we’d won the last time, and we were ready for the next challenge.
The team was getting along really well. Drummer Boy had gone and Cleo had gone, so there were no bossy people left who insisted on running everything, and I get along really well with the Candle, and even though Haley is completely self-absorbed and spoiled and thinks she’s a movie star, it isn’t as if mid-school hasn’t taught me how to deal with someone like that.
Besides, whatever else she is, she’s not malicious. She’s not the Pop-Tart.
I think I must have got caught up in it. Before I was complaining about how fake everything is, and that still bothers me, but now I’ve changed my mind, at least a little bit. I’m looking on this as training, like in the army. You shouldn’t go into a war without going to boot camp, and you shouldn’t be a hero without practice at being heroic. And, let’s face it, if you’re a hero you get cameras shoved in your face all the time, so you should get practice at that, too.
The more challenges we win, the more training we’ll have. And besides, it’s not like I like to lose.
I was thinking that maybe the Candle and I should be a team after the show is over. He’s my favorite of all the people here. I like him even though he’s been having sex with so many of the women. I don’t care, it’s just him being silly.
And John—that’s the Candle—talks to me like a real person. Sometimes like a person who’s also a little kid, like I’m nine or something, but at least he talks instead of yelling or trying to recruit me for conspiracies against the other players.
He and I would make a good team. We’re both powerful aces because our powers are really flexible. I can animate any stuffed animal you can name, and he can do anything with flame from cook dinner to blow down a building. He can use fire, and I have a fire-breathing dragon. We could have a partnership of fire.
I haven’t told John about this. Maybe he’d think I was too young, the way everybody else does.
But I’ll get older. They all forget that.
[cut]
I never know which of my friends to bring with me to the challenges. They tell me I can only bring three stuffies with me on each mission, which is ridiculous because my backpack can hold a lot more. They don’t want me to be too powerful, otherwise other candidates wouldn’t have a chance. So I have to try to guess what’s coming, and this time they were careful not to give me a clue.
So I took Puffy, because I always take Puffy. I took Mister Slithers, who is a centipede. He’s kind of gross when you see him fifteen feet long, but I took him because he can wriggle into small spaces, which Puffy can’t. It’s always hard to settle on the third animal, because I usually have strong ideas about the first two, and the third one is kind of up in the air. This time I settled on Peony the Pelican, which was the smartest thing I did. I was thinking that maybe she’d be useful for scooping up bad guys in her bill, and also for rescuing people. And also for anything that involves swimming.
I’ve learned that as soon as we leave the house I fly off on Puffy, with the whole team if possible. Two challenges ago, if Drummer Boy hadn’t been so bossy and insisted on giving orders and running everything and shouting, I would have been flying above the road on Puffy and the Red Team wouldn’t have been able to ambush us. And then I wouldn’t have lost Tusker, either. But then Drummer Boy was the one who was eliminated that week, so there was a positive side to our humiliating defeat.
But this time I wasn’t allowed to fly cover,