"A warm welcome to our first volunteers, Jonathan and Carla," Mysto said as the two walked up the stairs to the stage, immediately disproving the first of their theories. Mysto always seemed to say the names of the people who he invited without them ever having given them. There were multiple ways a charlatan could have found their names out: they didn't use fake names when buying tickets, for example, so if he picked his volunteers ahead of time, he would simply have to check who bought the seats he wanted to take his volunteers from. The other possibility was that he knew them from watching their show, but that was unlikely. Their channel wasn't exactly the most popular, with only a few thousand followers as opposed to the millions that lived in their city.
"Why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourselves while my assistants set up for the first trick?" Mysto said, and Jonathan picked up on his phrasing. 'Tell the audience', not 'tell me', implying he already knew some things.
"Well, I'm Jonathan Majors," he said "I play soccer recreationally, and I'm 32 years old."
"Carla Sullivan," Carla said, smiling and waving at the audience "I'm 32 and I dye my hair."
"Slightly uninteresting interesting facts, ah well, let's see if we can make things a little more interesting, eh?" The Great Mysto said, to a few chuckles and scattered applause from the audience "You can see behind me a box is being wheeled in."
Two beautiful women were, indeed, wheeling in the large box, large enough to fit a human inside with three doors that could be opened individually. The classic blades in a box trick. How it was usually supposed to work was that an assistant would go into the box and duck down through a hidden trapdoor in the floor, while similarly dressed women would ensure that when the doors were opened, they showed those parts were still present.
Jonathan and Carla had seen variations of this trick before, but not Mysto's version of it.
"Carla, why don't you step into the box?" he asked, the hint of a smile on his face.
"Actually, can I go first?" Jonathan asked, sticking to their prepared script "I'm a bit nervous, and would like to get it done before I chicken out."
They had prepared for this eventuality, too. If the magician had prepared a trick for one person, then switching around staging and choreography for someone taller and bulkier than them would perhaps reveal the fake.
"Of course, if you're sure?" There was something about the smile on The Great Mysto's face that he didn't like.
He, nonetheless, nodded and stepped into the box. The top of it was a little low for him, as if Mysto had, in-fact, prepared it for a woman instead of him. In the moments he had in the darkness, he used the opportunity to place a hidden camera in the corner of the box.
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