KIRBY'S LIVE MAGIC SHOW!

"It's Kirby's Magic Show again!" shouted Kirby.

But the audience was just cheering too loud. Frown.

"Oh, dear," said Kirby rather sadly. "What now?"

The audience stopped cheering and settled down again.

"Okay!" said Kirby. "For my next trick, I'm going to try something a bit larger in scale."

"LIKE?" shouted everyone in the audience simultaneously.

"Uh… I could try making a person vanish," said Kirby, "but that would be too easy."

The audience laughed, because their blood was now saturated with laughing gas.

"Instead," said Kirby, "I'm going to make an entire block of the audience disappear!"

"Woah!" gasped all of the people, imagining what that would look like.

"Okay," said Kirby. "I need time to prepare…"

Some dramatic music started playing over the speakers.

"Okay!" said Kirby. He pointed to the leftmost block of seats, which was packed full. "I'm going to make all those people disappear!"

The audience waited eagerly.

"Okay," said Kirby. "To make the magic work, I'm going to need you all to close your eyes, okay?"

"OKEY!" misspelled the audience members, sounding really excited about this.

Kirby nodded happily. "Same for the people watching on TV. If anyone, anywhere doesn't close their eyes, not only will the trick not work – but we'll all suddenly die!"

Everyone gasped in shock. Now they were definitely going to close their eyes!

"Close your eyes…" said Kirby.

Everyone closed their eyes.

"Notice that you can't hear anything," said Kirby quickly. "That means that these aren't all people in on the act who are walking out. It's real magic!"

The audience all murmured in understanding, their eyes still closed.

Silence.

Suddenly, a loud noise that sounded like a gust of wind echoed through the venue.

Silence.

"Okay," said Kirby, "you can open your eyes now."

All around the world, people opened their eyes – and that block of the audience was gone!

Everyone roared in applause.

"Wow," said someone in the audience, "that really is magic!"

"Where's mommy?" said someone else in the audience.

"Right!" said Kirby. "I'm afraid that that's all we have time before the ad break!"

"NUEEEEE!" screamed the audience in fear.

But then the end of the chapter was upon them.