Samus dropped her deadlift with a bang. That felt like a good place to call it, given her doubles match was coming up soon. There was no reason to overdo it. As she began to rack the weights, a familiar spiky form appeared to assist her.

"What do you want?" she asked.

Bowser's head fell, crestfallen. "Am I not allowed to do a single nice thing without being suspect?"

"Are you serious?" Samus scoffed.

Bowser racked the weights. "I don't need to do something nice if I want to talk to you."

"Yeah, but you have a habit of trying to butter people up before squeezing something out of them."

"Is that really how you see me?"

"What do you want?" she said.

Bowser jerked his head. "Outside."

Samus followed him out of the gym, eyes narrowed. The air was a little brisker recently. Over on the high ropes course, she could see Fox and Leaf doing something absurd on the more extreme obstacles. Bowser walked alongside the gym and out of earshot of the entrance.

"Ganon saw something strange the other day, and I thought you might want to let Hand and the others know about it. Two of the board members, he had no idea which ones, were arguing just outside the complex. I don't mean having a little disagreement, either. According to him, one was getting fairly threatening with it. It sounded like insubordination going on."

"Insubordination? Like they weren't following orders? What kind of orders does a board member need to follow?"

"I don't know. As I said, he said it just sounded like that. They could have just been someone doing something they didn't like. The point is, they were being inconspicuous about it. It's probably something we want to let Hand know about."

Samus folded her arms. After a moment, she told Bowser, "No."

"Huh?"

"I don't think we should bring this up to Hand. He's got enough going on as it is."

"So, you just want to ignore it?"

She watched Fox and Leaf head back across the training grounds and into the complex. "I'm not going to do that either. I've got another idea."

Truth be told, she hadn't exactly been in the mood to help Hand much. She wasn't so childish that she didn't care about what was going on with the company, but her interaction with him had been near zero since he let her know Ridley would be joining them.

"You know that reporter Fox was with at media day? The one that keeps showing up around the grounds?"

"Yeah, Kaitlin? The one that works for Corneria. Her article was the one that started making everyone real nervous."

"She also was particularly fast on the uptake when Hand released that statement."

"I would guess she was in direct contact with him on when it would come out and what would be in it."

Samus looked off into the distance at the skyline. "Sounds like she's been chomping at the bit for information. How about we indulge her?"

Bowser stroked his chin. "So, you do think there was something to that argument Ganon overheard."

"And I'd like to find out what it was about. Why not recruit the one person who's best at digging up these kinds of things?"

Bowser gave a short laugh. "I'll admit it sounds intriguing, but what're you going to do if Hand finds out you're conducting investigations on the board behind his back?"

"It'd be easy to explain that we were just trying to protect him, but until then there's no reason for him to know about it."

"We?"

"Well, yeah, you and Ganon were the ones who found out about it."

"Between my schedule and training someone that didn't come installed with an off switch, I don't have time to play detective." Samus gave him a doubtful look. Bowser looked affronted. "What is it with you heroes and thinking I don't make valuable use of my time? I don't see any of you spending hours a day training newbies!"

She rolled her eyes. "Fine, what do you need me to do to get you to cooperate?"

Bowser folded his arms and gave the proposal a bit of thought. "You take over Leaf's physical training, and I'll chip in with your little investigation. You probably know how to get more out of her physically than I can, but I'm keeping her for the practical training."

"Deal."

As for getting in contact with Kaitlin, the obvious answer was to go through Zelda, but Samus knew that letting Zelda know what they were up to was as good as letting Hand know. Therefore, she had to move on to the second most likely person.

"Hey, Fox."

"Mhmm?" Fox was sitting with Leaf in the dining hall.

"First off, why is there a piece of mashed potatoes in your fur?" She pointed at a morsel of food stuck on his head. Leaf almost inhaled her drink and Fox swatted at it.

"Gonna be finding pieces of that stuff all day," he grumbled.

"Anyway," said Samus, "do you know how to get in contact with Kaitlin from Corneria News? You two were hanging out at the media day."

"Why does everyone think I have some intimate relationship with her after one conversation?" Fox said to no one. When Samus gave him a perplexed look, he added, "I'm sure she has an email. Why don't you just ask Zelda for it?"

"Yeah, that's not an option, unfortunately," said Samus, avoiding eye contact. "How did she find that info?"

"You can probably just look it up. She's a reporter, it's not like she keeps her contact info hidden. Here..." he grabbed a Corneria newspaper that was lying on the table recently vacated by Marth and tossed it at her. "Just find something she wrote and look for the contact info."

Samus left the dining room while shuffling through the newspaper. Underneath one of Kaitlin's more recent articles diagnosing the reaction to Hand's statement was her contact information. Samus took the paper up to her room, pulled out her phone, and began typing out a message.

A few days later, Kaitlin was walking into a fine restaurant downtown in the city. She was wearing a black dress and had her handbag which held her phone, notepad, and other materials she figured she might need for recording information. She gave a slight nod to the waiter, who responded in kind and led her towards the back, where the tables were more private and overlooked the balcony. She would've preferred to have been outside, with the ambient sounds and breeze acting as natural insulation to their conversations, but it was getting too cold after dark to eat outside.

She sat down alone at the table set for four and told the waiter to just get her a glass of water while she waited for the other members of her party. She had intentionally arrived early knowing the waiter up front would know to guide everyone else back to her table without much confusion. Still, she was a little apprehensive. She never had a meeting like this before.

A few minutes later, heavy footsteps were approaching that the thick carpet tried desperately to muffle. She looked up to see the strangest sight she could remember.

Samus, Bowser, and Ganondorf were all there in formal evening attire, freshly cleaned up and composed. Her immediate thought was how much larger these champions looked up close. Samus was the smallest of the three and she still dwarfed Kaitlin. When Bowser and Ganon took their seats, they creaked slightly under their weight. Her second thought was how impressively they had dressed up. The last thing she had expected was for these three to effectively pull off classy appearances. Ganon had what looked like a military dress uniform on, Bowser wore a sharp black and white vest, and Samus was in a sparkling purple dress.

"I didn't even know you guys had clothing like this," she said. "You all look good."

"Honestly, I don't even remember getting this," said Samus, looking at her dress. "The only reason it's been in this good a shape for so long is that it never gets worn."

"Bit stuffy of an atmosphere for a simple conversation, no?" mumbled Bowser, tugging at his collar some and looking around the dimly lit room. Ganon seemed to have been strapped tight by his uniform. Their clothing wasn't very broken in.

Kaitlin gave him a head tilt. "Welcome to the socialite class. No one here will ask questions because they're all too busy plotting their schemes. Also, you're far less likely to be hounded as celebrities here."

"So, about what I mentioned," Samus tried to start, but Kaitlin held up a finger to stop her as she sipped on some water.

"Don't bring up business until you've finished eating," she said, delicately putting the glass down so it hardly made a sound. "Not only is everyone in a better mood by then, but no one feels like they're stuck having to stick through dinner if the conversation goes bad or wraps up sooner than expected."

Sure enough, Kaitlin kept the conversation light and simple for the entire dinner. To her surprise once again, the three of them handled themselves quite professionally when it came to ordering their food and eating. Bowser was the suavest, further compounding her curiosity. She kept these thoughts to herself, however. The point of keeping the conversation meaningless and carefree was to avoid derailing their impending discussion.

When dinner wrapped up and they ordered deserts, Kaitlin instinctively ordered something she knew would arrive a bit later than average. It was a common tactic of hers to serve as a natural lightener to the conversation should things go sour for any reason. Ample time to get under someone's skin, and then the deserts arrive right when they're beginning to feel upset. Of course, she had no intention of trying to dig into these three, but it was a natural tactic.

At this moment, she knew the others were getting antsy. She indulged their anxiety by asking, "So, you mentioned seeing something suspicious with the board members?"

The other two turned to look at Ganon, who finally snapped out of his stiff posture. "More than suspicious. If it had just been any other kind of disagreement, I probably would have ignored it, but this was intense. Whatever they were discussing, it's clear one of them was trying to threaten the other."

"What makes you think they were 'threatening' them rather than just being mad?" asked Kaitlin.

Ganon gave her a look that sent a small chill down her spine. "Posture, positioning, proximity, tone, I didn't have to hear the words to know they were trying to assert control over them. Whatever had happened, they wanted to put them in their place."

Kaitlin reached into her bag and pulled out her notebook and pen. "And you say you didn't know who the two people were? Then how did you know they were board members?"

"Zelda happened to be walking by just as they were leaving the complex, and I pointed them out to her and asked."

Kaitlin paused her writing and glanced up at Ganon. Even Samus had shaken her head a little and Bowser was looking down at the table with raised eyebrows.

"You...asked Zelda?" she clarified.

"Yes," he responded rather flatly.

"Okay," Kaitlin continued, not wanting to let him dwell for too long on that awkward bit, "can you describe them? There aren't many board members, I can probably narrow them down."

"The one being threatening was a younger woman, fur and ears like yours-."

"Alex," Kaitlin sounded off automatically. "Yes, I know exactly who that is. She's an up-and-coming hotshot from my world. Lots of capital wealth, and her family has quite a range of connections. She's still young and naïve though, I could see how she ended up getting on the wrong side of the more established class."

"The other one was a middle-aged woman. Black hair with some gray streaks. Wore a business suit. I could've sworn she looked like the one I know...shows up at the arena sometimes...what was her name...?"

This time Kaitlin put her notepad down, befuddled. "Catharine Barr?"

"Yeah, that sounds right."

Kaitlin stared at Ganon for a second. She was fully prepared for one of the more hardnosed or ambiguous board members to be the one threatening, but Catharine? She could be fervent, but usually, it was in support of the competition that she was such a fan of. What was she doing threatening other board members at a time like this? Did she think they were sabotaging the competition? Were they not showing enough support, or being too hard on Hand?

"I'm not sure how else to convince you, but that's who I saw," said Ganon, noting Kaitlin's perplexed look.

"No, I believe you," said Kaitlin, "it's just a strange situation. There's certainly a lot of intrigue to it."

"So, will you help us look into it?" asked Samus.

"Help you? Oh no, you'll be helping me," said Kaitlin. "This doesn't seem like much right now, but there could be a huge source of potential hidden if we dig deep enough."

"What do you mean help you?" asked Samus.

"I'll need you guys to do some digging for me. It'll look way too suspicious for me to be hanging around the complex more than I already do, but you guys can strut all over without question."

"Whoa, whoa," said Bowser, "I don't recall recruiting you so that we can be your pawns."

Just then, dessert showed up. Their faces all relaxed at the sight of sundaes as tall as their heads and Kaitlin's intentionally complicated banana split with piping hot chocolate syrup. They put their conversation on hold so they could enjoy themselves. When they finished, the mood had lightened.

"What I meant," said Kaitlin, knowing she needed to take control now, "is you guys have access that I have zero chance of obtaining myself. Hand has already given me a loose leash on the grounds from time to time, but there's no way he lets me just parade around the complex as I wish. Furthermore, it'll give the impression that Hand is only letting one reporter into the complex, and it's the one that most think is more biased towards him. It's not a good look for him or me. I don't care how you do things, but I can tell you what information is and isn't important and who you need to be looking out for."

They mused over the proposal. The waiter came by during their silence to clean up their table and left a single receipt behind with no sign of how long it would be until he came back. They suspected, per Kaitlin's explanation, that they could sit here for as long as was necessary.

"We're not spies," said Bowser. "And we can't be going off on tangents all day or we'll look suspicious, or at least weird."

"I'm not going to ask you to break into offices or steal information," said Kaitlin. "These things take time to pick apart. For all we know, nothing is happening. If there is, though, it'll take a lot of careful, slow maneuvering on my part to figure it out. No one is ever willing to spill the truth outright, but I can piece it together with enough persistence. You guys can work at your own pace."

Ganon had made up his mind. "Done," he said. "I don't have a whole lot going on anyway, but my gut says this has to do with what's been happening recently."

"Alright," sighed Bowser, still not convinced, but knowing he had to hold up his deal with Samus.

"What do you need from us?" asked Samus.

"As of right now, nothing," said Kaitlin. "I'll give you my number, and I'll contact you when I need something. Could be tomorrow, could be a week from now."

She exchanged info with them, and with that, their secret little meeting had come to an end.

"So, is there some special order we're supposed to leave in?" Bowser asked.

"No," laughed Kaitlin, "but go on ahead. I'll see you around."

She watched the waiter up front bid them farewell, but he still didn't come back for the check just yet. Kaitlin was still there, looking down at her notepad. She hadn't written much; there was no need. She agreed with Ganon. As soon as she heard his explanation, she knew something much larger was going on behind the scenes with the board members. This was just the confirmation that it was happening, and the only reason she found out was because of her new contact with the champions, something she had been sorely lacking due to Hand's otherwise guarded approach to the media's access to them. With not only one, but three major champions in her list of contacts, she now had incredible access to uncover not just information about the board, but anything that was going on inside the complex.

"Game on, Adam," she said to herself with a smirk.

A few weeks into performing pre- and post-fight interviews, they had become comfortable enough with the system that they began allowing more members of the media to show up. They also expanded the interviews to all champions, and schedules were adjusted to explicitly allow time before and after each fight. Hand also had the idea to broadcast the interviews in the stadium as well, hoping to encourage higher attendance and more time spent in the facility. They also planned on expanding to doing interviews for the doubles matches soon, although that wasn't a priority.

The doubles matches alone weren't outright saving the company, but they had certainly hit a particular niche of viewers that now tuned into them with remarkable consistency. It applied a nice buffer to the otherwise falling ratings.

"I feel like we're doing well," said Zelda, turning over some new business metrics Hand had just brought up.

"It's better than I hoped," said Hand, "but unfortunately it doesn't seem to be convincing the board. All they've said so far about our success is that we aren't nearly back to the levels we used to have."

"Well, that's unfair. Are they expecting this to just go back to a hundred percent instantly?"

"I'm not sure what they would consider a success. They're not being open about it. I'm used to ambiguity when it comes to their desires, but they've been particularly murky about this. I doubt anything short of blowing expectations out of the water will make them happy."

Zelda tossed the papers back onto the desk. "This is getting more difficult the harder we try. I thought the original goal was just to get our viewership numbers back up. Now they're adding all these conditions?"

"I don't think you should ever expect this to be a fair fight. These people have their motives, and they'll bend and break rules to get their way."

"You think they're trying to sabotage?"

"Not necessarily, but some of them have their mind set on making cuts, and they don't want to be proven otherwise. They'll keep moving the goalposts as much as they can."

Zelda rubbed her eyes. This was quickly becoming a stressor for her. The problem seemed so straightforward a few weeks ago, but now it was turning into a mountain of a challenge. The interviews alone had been a logistical feat, and now they needed to stack more on top. Thankfully, Mario and DK had been a massive boon there with brushing up everyone's interviewing skills.

"Let's take a look at what specifically worked and try to emulate it," said Hand. "I'd like to look at the interviews. They ended up being more successful than anticipated."

"Why not the doubles matches?" asked Zelda. "They resulted in larger increases."

"Because the doubles attracted a small, core group of fans that we already have the attention of. There isn't much left there for us to gain. The interviews, however, brought in a much broader audience which gives us more potential." He sat back down at his desk and picked up his pen. "So, what do you think?"

She tapped the side of her head where she had a light headache forming. "Well, what did we do that attracted people?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, what did we do in the most basic terms? I know we conducted interviews, but what did we do for the viewers specifically?"

Hand bit the end of his pen. "That's a good way to look at it. I suppose by having the interviews, people got to see a side of the champions they never had before."

Zelda nodded. "They got to see them talk and explain things from their perspective. It showed more of their character and brought face-to-face interaction to people."

"What do you think that means we should do more of, then?"

She shrugged. "Show more of them?"

Hand raised an eyebrow. "Explain."

"You know, get them out there more. In public. Let them meet people and hang out. The only times we ever do that are at the bars and plazas right outside the arena, and it's so crowded that hardly anyone can get to us. Also, media day is always so huge, why not have more?"

"More media days?" Hand winced a little and scratched his head.

"What's wrong?"

"It's just...I'm not hugely fond of letting the media just have their way with you guys. I allow one day each time there's a big change in the roster, and even then, people still try to go after you guys."

"Don't you think you're being a little overly protective?"

Hand looked up at her. "It's not so cut and dry. These people, they're more like how I was explaining the board to you. They'll skirt rules when they can to get close, and then when they have you, they'll push whatever agenda they've got planned. The last thing they have in mind is your best interests, and that even includes Kaitlin. Yes, she comes across as favorable to us, but don't doubt for a second that if she got some huge scoop that something disastrous was going to happen next week, there wouldn't be a front-page article about it in Corneria news the next day."

"I think you need to let some of the more experienced people go. Some of us have been here for ten, even fifteen years."

Hand sighed. It was like a mother telling her kid to stop playing with their toys and go pick up a hobby or a job. There wasn't much he could say against it. He knew the Big Eight, especially with some choice veterans could probably handle themselves, but he was still uncomfortable about it.

"What do you suggest?" he said.

"Just for a very select few, let a few reporters come onto the grounds and talk to them throughout each week. We'll start slow and easy like we did the interviews and ramp it up as we get comfortable. It'll be very casual."

"Alright. I'll choose the first ones that'll be interviewed and let them know," said Hand.

"Who did you have in mind."

"Mario, Link, Captain, and Leaf."

"L-Leaf?" Zelda shook her head. "I thought we were going to pick all veterans."

"Yes, but I have a special circumstance for her. Have you noticed how much she's been training with Bowser recently? I was thinking we could have those two be interviewed together."

Now it was Zelda's turn to be uncomfortable. "The thing is, Leaf…she's been a little on the hot side ever since she lost to Simon. Are you sure you want her under pressure like that?"

"It'll be fine," said Hand with a smile. "Your insight has given me a great plan for this."