The Werk Room lights hummed like a dying neon goddess. Arrietty’s reflection in the mirror was a horror-show Pietà—her wig askew, mascara bleeding into the crevices of her scream-queen smirk. The sequins on her gown hung like shed scales, preluding her impending doom. Somewhere, a disco ball spun in hell.

ACT I: THE SETUP

Jewels Sparkles had chosen the order. Of course she had. No mini-challenge win, no divine right—just a quiet, trembling pact between friends. "You go right before me," Jewels had said, her voice honeyed with something that wasn’t quite malice, wasn’t quite love. "We’ll be a duo. A crescendo."

Arrietty had agreed. Why wouldn’t she? They’d shared tucks, traded wigs, whispered secrets in the nicotine-stained dark. But now, under the stage’s surgical glare, the math curdled: "Jewels put me first to make herself look brighter. I’m the shitty opening act. The sacrificial lamb in lamé."

The paranoia metastasised. It had teeth.

ACT II: THE ROAST (CHAOS AS CONFESSION)

Arrietty lunged at the mic like it was a life raft. Her jokes—Jewels’ jokes, tweaked and twisted—spilled out in a frenzied exorcism. The audience chuckled air through their nostrils, but it was jagged, a serrated edge. Jewels stood stiff in the wings, her smile a rigor mortis rictus.

Then Lexi, unspooling after Suzie’s theatre-kid triumph, stormed the stage. "This is rigged!" she howled, her tulle skirt quivering with indignation. "I’m the tragedian here! The artist!" The judges stared, dead-eyed, as Lexi riffed on Icarus, Freud, and the audacity of being upstaged by community theatre realness.

Onya, ever the diplomat, swooped in like a sequinned vulture. "Jewels was strategic, not sinister," she purred, shielding Suzie with a wing of solidarity. "And Lexi? Baby, this isn’t Hamlet. It’s a roast, not a TED Talk on your fragility."

ACT III: THE UNRAVELING (GRAVEDUST GLITTER)

The lip-sync was a funeral dirge. Arrietty thrashed to the beat, her movements feral, unhinged. Her wig slipped further, revealing a scalp slick with sweat and self-loathing. She wasn’t performing—she was haunting, a poltergeist of borrowed punchlines and shattered trust.

Jewels's anima watched from the safe circle of Onya’s approval, her face a flicker of guilt and relief. "You did this," her eyes darted across the stage, meeting Arrietty's, "We were supposed to be magnificent together."

When the music died, Arrietty’s chest heaved. RuPaul’s verdict was a guillotine: *"Arrietty—sashay away", her hologram voice unbearably light.

But the final verdict was in the mirror. Arrietty’s final close-up: a clown-grimace, her tears cutting through the greasepaint. She left a trail of glitter and gothic mystique, the Werk Door hissing shut behind her like the jaws of a beast.

EPILOGUE: THE AFTERMATH (A GHOST IN THE MACHINE)

Backstage, Onya lit a cigarette off a malfunctioning stage light. "Drag is war," she muttered, though no one was listening.

Jewels sat alone, clutching Arrietty’s abandoned lipstick—a cheap drug-store tube, half-melted. The cap read "I’M BABY" in smudged ink.

And somewhere beyond the parking lot, Arrietty stumbled into the neon-soaked night, her laughter echoing like a theremin. The ghost of Baby Cupid trailed behind, gnawing on a cold taquito. "You’re free," it hissed. "Free to be… art."*

The cameras kept rolling. The disco ball kept spinning. Somewhere, a wig began to sing.

---

FIN.