The character design competition gets announced at their flower viewing. Just like Ko’s designs for “Fairies’ Stories” was chosen right after she had joined the company after graduating high school, everyone has a chance to enter. Aoba reads the proposal that Shizuku and the other members of the design team comes up with, and ends up going through a lot of trial and error. Aoba can’t seem to get the designs just right. She goes to visit Ko and sees that she has already completed numerous sketches that are all high quality and Aoba is amazed. Aoba uses her feelings of frustration from this to try to motivate her and enters the character design competition.