Jessie was bound and determined to make sure that this day's rehearsals went far smoother than the day before. Of course, they got a later start that morning, as not only did she have to go and get props for her freestyle performance, but also contact headquarters and inform them that she was transmitting a Pokémon egg their way. Maybe not the most impressive plunder to send to the boss, but it was better than nothing, and they'd had only nothing to offer for awhile now. The egg would push them at least a bit further back into good graces.

Once those errands were taken care of, however, Jessie threw herself into rehearsals, and thankfully Meowth, Wobbuffet, and Gourgeist seemed to be on the same page as her, listening attentively and keeping their focus on the task at hand, Meowth even keeping his sarcastic quips to a minimum. Whether it was because they felt guilty over what had transpired the day before and wanted to make it up to her, or they were just scared of pushing her to that extreme again, Jessie didn't know, but figured the cause of their helpful demeanor wasn't as important as the result.

And this day, she got results. Jessie's plan of what she wanted her performance to be and her Pokémon's focus combined to create a perfect recipe for progress. The resolve Jessie had made earlier in the day to attempt to keep her explosive temper in check lest she, advertently or otherwise, drove her Pokémon away again seemed to have been unnecessary. The rehearsals ran so smoothly, and the steady improvement in their routine became so apparent, that the anger that had driven Jessie most of the previous day barely even flared up at all.

Amazing how much progress one could make when volatile emotions didn't get in the way.

The general course of the day left Jessie buffed with poise and confidence as she touched up her makeup backstage that evening, waiting for the showcase to begin. The excited and nervous twittering of the other performers, most of them younger than her, filtered through her ears as merely dull background noise. Jessie saw no real need to concern herself with them. She had run a quick glance over each one as they filed in the dressing room, pleased that the twerpette wasn't among them. Beating her was always a treat, of course, but the presence of any of the twerps would have just soiled this otherwise stellar day. Besides, Jessie had the master class to look forward to in regards to showing the twerpette who the true Kalos Queen was.

"Oh my goodness! Jessilee! Hi!"

Of course, Jessie had not counted on any of the twerpette's friends being there.

"That's right," she responded proudly, Meowth (perched on the vanity) rolling his eyes a bit. "The true star of the show!"

The girl, wearing a dress adorned with far too many bows, grinned and giggled, radiating excitement. Jessie did recognize her, vaguely, from some of the previous showcases but struggled to remember her name, that is before she remembered that she didn't really care. "You were amazing at the Couriway showcase! I watched it on TV and I was rooting for you to win—I'm so glad you did! Have you won any other princess keys yet?"

"I'll be winning one tonight," Jessie smirked.

"Hey, I plan on that!" the girl responded, crossing her arms good-naturedly. "I just need one more to qualify for the master class."

"And you will not be getting it here!" Jessie found herself growing a bit irritated. She had no desire to facilitate rivalries—friendly or otherwise—as the twerps always seemed to. All of the other performers were merely forgettable extras in the stage play of her life, nothing more.

"I guess we'll just see what the audience thinks. My mom's here tonight," the girl blabbed on, Jessie already tuning her out as she turned her attentions back to applying her mascara. "So I know she'll be rooting for me! Although your fanbase does blow mine out of the water!"

Jessie's ignoring of the girl—Shauna, she finally remembered her name—wasn't as effective as she'd thought. The last sentence brought her questioning glare squarely back on the enthusiastic girl's face. "What?"

Shauna was undeterred, still grinning from ear to ear. "Your husband. He's always so excited for you! I know it's hard to hear individual voices from the stage, but whenever you're on he's always cheering so loudly."

Realizing that she must be talking about James, Jessie answered, a bit awkwardly, "He's… not my husband." She felt even more awkward with the realization that she wished he was.

"Well," said Shauna with a good-natured shrug, "whoever he is, he's your biggest fan! And I think his cheering is infectious. The people sitting near him always seem to vote for you, too."

Jessie could feel her face turning redder and redder, heightened even more by Meowth's knowing smirk at her. "I'll make sure to thank him after I've won."

A stagehand poked his head into the dressing room, saving Jessie from further fangirling from Shauna, and thus also from indirect fanboying from James. "Showcase is about to begin! Lydia, Colette, and Jessilee are up first!"

Jessie clicked her compact shut, thankful that her embarrassment was quickly transferring itself into drive. "Perfect! This audience gets a taste of perfection right from the get-go. Come on, Meowth, we have a theme performance to win!"

"Lord help us all," Meowth muttered under his breath.

…

"Bonjour, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Vigroux City Pokémon Showcase!" Monsieur Pierre announced with his usual showmanship and flair, much to the delight of the audience. "We have fifteen lovely performers vying for a chance to win this princess key!" At this cue, his klefki cooed happily and floated upwards, displaying a golden key with an ornate sparkling horseshoe-shaped design as the key's handle. "But to win it, our performers must first make it through tonight's theme performance."

Obscured on the still dark stage, to the left of both of the other performers, Jessie gulped anxiously, trying to ready her nerves before the spotlights revealed them to the crowd. It wasn't like her to be nervous, and it definitely wasn't like her to express that nervousness to her adoring public. Her limbs, trembling in anxiety, unfortunately did alert Meowth to her unease, as he was perched upon her shoulder. "Here's to hopin' that the theme they've chosen is right up our alley," he said quietly to her, his uneven smile betraying his own apprehension.

"There's nothing we don't excel at," Jessie responded assuredly.

"Except nabbin' Pikachu…"

"Stuff it!"

"And our first three performers have taken the stage! Lydia, Colette, and Jessilee!"

As the emcee announced their names, the spotlights turned on the three performers, and when Jessie's alias was called, she struck a wily pose, a hand extended to the crowd as a pleased, noble laugh escaped her lips. Meowth mimicked the pose as best he could from his perch, his smile a little more genuine now.

"And now…" Monsieur Pierre grinned, clearly enjoying drawing out the tension, "it is time to reveal tonight's theme performance!"

The rest of the stage was flooded with lights, revealing to the confused performers (and just as confused audience) three individual tracks stretching the entire length of the performance area, each one sprinkled with various obstacles and hurdles. The stage itself was meticulously overgrown with brush and debris, pools of water blocking the path every so often, and trees that almost looked real obscured much of this to the performers themselves (although the audience could see most of the courses perfectly).

"A true Pokémon performer," Monsieur Pierre explained, "in addition to being beautiful and charming and able to draw out the talents of her Pokémon, must also be clever and able to think on her feet. And thus, our theme performance tonight is an obstacle course!"

The audience mulled its way to an applause that grew more and more understanding and enthusiastic.

"Each of our performers must navigate her way through the course with the help of one Pokémon. Whoever clears her course first will advance to the freestyle round! Performers, please take your positions at the start of the course."

Jessie could finally breathe more fully again, and didn't have to fake not being nervous anymore. Grinning at Meowth as she situated herself at the starting line of the far left course, she said, "This course can't throw anything our way that we haven't dealt with a million times before!"

"Yeah! This'll be a piece of cake!" Meowth exclaimed elatedly, leaping off her shoulder and posing at the ready at her feet.

From his announcing platform, Pierre seemed just as excited as Jessie and Meowth. "Are you in your places, ladies? Excellent! Then, on my mark… get set… GO!"

Jessie and Meowth took off, easily vaulting over the beginning set of boulders and ducking under overgrown vegetation, the only worry crossing Jessie's mind being one of adversely rumpling up her performance dress and hair (hair that had taken hours to finally tame). Meowth, with no clothes or hair to worry about, sprang ahead, plowing a path through the thick grass. Layers of vines hung in front of him, blocking their view of what lay ahead of them.

"Cut them down with fury swipes!" Jessie instructed.

"Roger that! YAAAHH!" Meowth leapt into the air and sliced vines as if they were strings, causing the vines to fall to the ground in clumps.

As they fell, Jessie began to gain a glimpse of what followed them—a wide, sticky, muddy, wet mess of terrain. A branch from a tree on the other side bridged the two sides together, but said branch was a good twenty or thirty feet in the air. Seeing it as well, Meowth stopped slashing and slid off the vine, landing on Jessie's shoulder.

"Whaddaya know?" he smirked at her. "That rope climbing practice you got yesterday's gonna pay off after all!"

"Hmph. That still doesn't excuse Gourgeist and Wobbuffet. Or you." Jessie was returning the smirk, however. She confidently grabbed a still-hanging vine and shimmied up it with ease, Meowth clinging onto her arm with considerably much less terror than he had the day before. Once within arm's length of the branch, Jessie swung herself over and hoisted herself on top. Meowth jumped off her arm and onto the sturdy limb as well. They crossed over on the "natural" bridge and took a look at their course from their new vantage point.

"Another big water hazard comin' up next," Meowth observed. "Lazy coise designers…"

Jessie reached above them and broke off a smaller branch. "There's a piece of plywood down there that we can sit on and row across. Find something to use as an oar." She grasped another vine and slid back down to the ground.

"I woulda appreciated yesterday more if I'da known it was actually training," Meowth commented, following her down to the ground. "And I think my arms will do just fine as oars. Is that thing gonna hold us?"

"One way to find out!" Jessie pushed Meowth onto the plywood before clamoring on as well and paddling with the strong branch. With Meowth's paws paddling on the other side of the plywood, they crossed over the water hazard and reached the other dry side in no time flat. Now more boulders and debris littered the path ahead of them, with nary a space to squeeze through at first glance.

Jessie and Meowth, however, didn't even have to speak to each other.

With simply a glance and a grin, they took to ducking and weaving their way through the obstacles, the crowd roaring with approval. In seemingly an instant they came to a large hollow cylinder, painted as if it were a log. Jessie hoisted herself on top and quickly walked across it while Meowth crawled through the center. A zip line awaited them at the other end, and Jessie and Meowth reached it simultaneously, riding it down and mounting a graceful landing.

The applause grew even wilder, although Jessie was confused. She couldn't figure out where to go from here.

"Zut alors!" Pierre exclaimed from his podium, astounded. "We have a winner already! Jessilee has completed the course in record time!"

"We won?" Meowth repeated, dumbstruck.

"That was it?" Jessie asked incredulously. "That was all the obstacles we had to clear?" She turned and looked behind her at the course, unable to even see the other two competitors. Were they really that far behind?

Meowth followed her line of sight, looking just as stunned as she was that this had been all it took to win the preliminary round, before finally shrugging and looking back up at her. "Hey, I ain't gonna question it. A win's a win!"

"That it is!" Gleefully, Jessie turned back to her adoring public, her ovation still strong, and struck a confident pose, one hand outstretched in the air. "You're all going crazy now; just wait until you see my freestyle performance!" she exclaimed proudly, soaking in the thrill of victory.

…

The four other groups of performers made their way through the obstacle courses as well, although Jessie, backstage with all of her Pokémon, wasn't paying that much attention. She was using this time to go over the last minute details of their performance with her co-performers.

"…after that, Meowth, you'll use your fury swipes and—"

"I know, I know." A bit grumpily, Meowth tugged at his costume. "Tell me again why I gotta be the joker?

"Because Wobbuffet and Gourgeist are the king and queen," Jessie answered impatiently. "Now—"

"I should be the king! Or heck, I'd even take bein' the queen—"

"You aren't the new parents of an egg! Of course the new parents get to be the king and queen!"

Wobbuffet and Gourgeist, who had been proudly strutting their stuff in their fancy royalty costumes beforehand, now shrunk back a little bit with ashamed blushes lighting their faces again, both Pokémon obviously still feeling guilt from the whole scenario.

"Oh, so if they hadn't banged, I'd be the star of the show?"

"Is that brain of yours even working?! Of course not! I'M the star of the show!" Jessie reminded him fiercely.

"Wobba!" Wobbuffet agreed eagerly.

"Gour!" Gourgeist did likewise.

Meowth sighed, straightening out the jingle balls on his jester's cap. "Of coise, how stupid of me, how could I forget?"

The muffled sound of the crowd applauding filtered into the dressing room, alerting the performers that the fifth and final round had been won. Distractedly, Jessie looked up at the screen, seeing that Shauna was the last performer advancing to the freestyle round. She stood at the end of the course with her ivysaur, looking proud yet ragged, her hair unkempt and her breathing hard and unsteady.

Surprised, Jessie looked at the other three finalists, who had been back in the dressing room with her for varying amounts of time. While they had all had at least some time to recover from the obstacle course, they still all looked…

"They're exhausted," Jessie remarked, startled. "All of them."

Meowth, Gourgeist, and Wobbuffet all exchanged glances, Meowth being the first to finally genuinely smile. He looked up at Jessie with excitement. "We've got this in the bag, Jess!" he exclaimed, voicing the thought Jessie had still been trying to piece together.

Of all of the times to get ahead of herself, this would have been the most ample opportunity in a long while for Jessie to do so, but to her surprise she shook her head quickly. "That may be," she said severely, "but that does not mean that we're going to slack off just because the competition's crap! We will leave no wiggle-room for our competition!"

"That's right!" grinned Meowth, extending his paw out to Jessie's hand. "We're gonna blow the competition so far outta the water they'll need a locomotive to catch back up to us!"

"Gourgeist gourgeist!" Gourgeist added enthusiastically, adding her feathery arm into the mix.

"Wobba-wobba-wobbuffet!" Wobbuffet finished confidently, his nub completing the group gesture.

"The freestyle performance is next!" a stagehand called into the dressing room. "Jessilee, you're up first!"

"Now let's show this audience the true standard they should be judging all of us by," Jessie proclaimed, practically leaping out of her chair. "Let's give them a performance they'll never forget!"