My Evil Stepmother, The Comedic Terror

Previously

…Mr. Abernathy, bless his kind heart, finally found his voice. “Well,” he stammered, adjusting his spectacles, “it’s certainly… thought-provoking, Alex. Very… thought-provoking indeed.” The murmurs began to rise, no longer of confusion, but of a shared, tentative understanding. The air, which had been thick with manufactured gaiety, now hummed with a different kind of energy – the unsettling, yet strangely unifying, energy of shared vulnerability. Seraphina, for the first time that night, looked truly exposed, her carefully constructed world teetering on the brink of collapse. The prelude to pandemonium had begun, and I, armed with the ink of her secrets, had just set the stage.