First story in the fandom! :)
No idea how people spell Kyuubey in this fandom, but hopefully it's still phonetically compatible! Also, I refer to the cubes that the demons leave behind as Curse Cubes…mostly because I like the alliteration, lol.
It was painfully nostalgic.
Homura was drawn to it immediately—a barely noticeable whirlpool on the brick wall of an abandoned construction site.
A Barrier, she thought at first, but that couldn't be it because Witches didn't exist anymore.
Regardless, she stepped in—finding herself in what she could only describe as a Labyrinth.
But it couldn't have been that…Labyrinths only came with Witches, and Witches only came with her own memories.
She set her thoughts aside and surged forward, reaching over her shoulder to pull an energy-infused arrow into the tense bow in other hand in preparation for anything that might decide to pop up. Surveying the atmosphere of swirling marbling colors and watching her step as she sprinted over a self-destructive staircase, she quickly calculated the enemy's power by the complexity of the twists and turns in the fantasy landscape.
Tapping into her past life's experiences, she defeated the monster—one, two, three shots at its despaired and brooding center. It had been some sort of ball of dark threads, in its middle a pulsing and very much alive heart-like core. It had growled, roared, and snapped as her white gold arrows had blown its tendrils apart and had severed its extending limbs from the rest of its body.
And then within a few seconds—who really knew or cared how long in a timeless existence?—everything collapsed into a pocket of black, and she bent down to hold the obsidian-like gem in her hand, studying what was left of the monster she had just shot down.
Her Soul Gem had only recently been cleared—suicidal as it could have been, Homura didn't bother purifying herself.
She tossed the scrap of evil behind her, at the white-furred creature at her feet.
"Is your stomach never full?" the raven-haired girl hissed, watching its back open up to swallow the Curse Cube whole.
"What do you mean?" it innocuously asked, shaking its fur for a moment.
She clacked her heel on the ground, staring down ominously at the Incubator. "Well," she explained, slowly, "all I've ever been doing since the beginning of this time is ridding the world of demons before they even arise—and all you've ever been doing is eating the damned Curses."
"You must mean that we have been eating them," the creature corrected. "We take turns, you know. We're not as uncivilized to hoard energy—there just isn't a point to saving everything for oneself."
The magical girl's eyebrows narrowed. "So you're not the same fucking Kyuubey I was speaking to just yesterday?" she concluded.
"Of course not—did you really think that creatures like us would make attachments?" it said, almost mockingly. "We speak telepathically and we often share our conscious memories with each other…so it appears that we're the same."
When she didn't respond spitefully, it added offhandedly, "To be an individual in human society must mean to have thoughts of one's own…humans don't share anything, do they?"
Homura wasn't about to let herself turn enraged over Kyuubey's—or maybe it was more accurate to say Kyuubeys', now—criticisms of her kind, knowing that the aliens would never understand. She didn't argue; it was probably good that the Incubators couldn't wrap their minds around how humans operated—they would have exploited so much more out of Earth.
Her lavender eyes stared to the side for a moment before murmuring, "What was that…thing, anyway?"
It was unlike anything she had seen before, yet so alike what she had seen before, in another time.
Kyuubey didn't answer the question. "You know, we don't have genders in our world; that's another reason why the human race was so intriguing to us. It doesn't make sense—you would ultimately need two of the same species to create the next generation. Why would the biology evolve to decrease the success rate of the very being?"
She flipped her hair over her shoulder impatiently.
"Answer the damn question."
Then, in its ever nonchalant voice: "It's a Wizard."
Before she could say anything else, the otherworld creature continued.
"We had always thought that the female of the species was the weaker of the humans. Based on our studies of human interactions, it always seemed that men were stronger. Additionally, analysis showed that males were more physically capable than women—naturally having more muscle mass and generally having a bulkier and heavier build, correlating with testosterone levels. Men, in society, were more commonly seen taking up professional careers when compared to women, too.
"But of course, we have now realized that men harbored feelings as much as women do. That's to say: they can suffer just as much as girls do and they can suffer the same emotional turmoil as a woman," it continued. "And recently with the influx of energy recently absorbed from Madoka's transformation, we've been able to budget more experimental procedures.
"Take Madoka's brother for instance. Given a choice between Madoka and Tatsuya, we originally wouldn't dare to even waste effort on Tatsuya. But now—"
Homura whipped around, voice as sharp as the arrow she wanted to stab through its—their, all of their—lives.
"Don't you dare hurt him."
A wag of white fluffy tail.
"I wasn't thinking of it—that was just an instance," Kyuubey admitted. "But now that you mention it, he would be a prime target, wouldn't he?" it asked as her eyes widened as she realized the mistake that had slipped off of her tongue.
Her resolve crumbled, realizing that she, while trying to protect what still mattered, had worsened the situation. While she thought she was preventing bad from happening, she had really just made it all even more awful.
She had done it again.
How could she be so stupid to have just jumped to conclusions?
And not only that, but in trying to defend one more person, ruined everything else?
"You'd keep going back in time to save him like you did for Madoka and perhaps then he'll be the largest energy source of them all…" and something flashed in the Incubator's glassy eyes:
"Just like his sister!"
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