CHAPTER 3:
ARGUMENTUM AD PASSIONES
It was after Lady Trey finished speaking to them that Moni asked Homura to tell him what was going on. Of the events that led to the time loop. Of what turned the shy Homura Akemi into a cold, stoic warrior, determined to save Madoka Kaname.
It took a long time. Longer than Moni had taken to explain his own background. Even skipping over the details of the previous timelines, she gave him a succinct summary of what had happened, and what happened when she tried to change the timeline. Of the fact that the ending refused to change, no matter how she changed the story.
After she had finished, Moni remained silent for a time. He seemed contemplative, before he said, "You seem to think that many parts of the timeline are a forgone conclusion. That's because…well, the abilities you are granted as part of the Incubator's pact tend to be singular in purpose. In fact, you were lucky to get your time travel abilities into the bargain."
"And why is that?" Homura asked, her cold edge returning.
"From what you told me, Sayaka's demise, whether it be because she is killed, regardless of whether she is a Magical Girl or not, or turned into a Witch, varies in times and circumstances. If it were a fixed point in time(1), then there'd be little variation in the time of her demise, or the circumstances for that matter. Standard deviation(2) for fixed points like a single person's death is usually a few hours at most, not the days you've indicated. Of course, my temporal theory is pretty basic. But the Incubators may be able to tell if one of Lady Trey's people come here, or at least if they come here officially. The Incubators are afraid of them, and may decide on a scorched Earth policy, and blame it on the Witches. They've done it before."
Homura shuddered at such a thought. "And they get away with it," she stated, her voice dripping with barely concealed venom.
"Most civilisations are really concerned about universal heat death, especially after the entropy wave disaster. Some are looking for alternatives, but too many have thrown their lot in with the Incubators." A bitter chuckle wormed its way out of his pale lips. "They consider the harvesting of a small proportion of primitive races to be a small price to pay. Many of them do not dissimilar things. Not on the same scale, usually, but I've heard about dodgy deals the Adipose(3) get involved with, though they at least avoid the Incubators. Some are too scared. They know the Incubators arranged for my people to be wiped out from the cosmos. They're afraid that the Incubators may do the same to them."
Changing the subject back to what it had been, Homura said, "You think Sayaka's death can be avoided. And Mami Tomoe's death. And Kyoko Sakura's." It was a question, but spoken as a statement. Her tone was sceptical, and understandably so.
"It's worth trying."
"Worth trying?" She nearly spat the words out incredulously, emotion that had long since been tamped down beginning to boil upwards. "I have tried, Moni. I've done nothing but try! Unlike you, I have tried, time and time again, to stop them from falling into darkness! Mami tried to murder us all when she found out the truth! All that I care about is Madoka! I don't want her to suffer any more!"
Moni didn't recoil. Instead, he looked at her levelly, like an adult waiting for a child to finish. He was a mass of contradictions. At times calm and collected, at other times, a nervous near-klutz, and at yet other times, as cold and detached as Homura was forced to make herself.
Eventually, he said, "I know what it's like to fail. To keep failing, no matter what. To feel responsible for every failure. To discard what seems hard to accomplish, in order to make your goals easier. To discard feelings and empathy like they were old ragged clothes. Homura, are you familiar with the philosopher Nietzsche?"
"I have heard of him."
He sighed, before saying, "He once said something. Those who fight monsters must take care lest they become monsters themselves."
Once more, her anger was unleashed. Homura was out of the hospital bed, bearing Moni to the floor, a knife summoned from her arsenal at his throat. "How dare you? How dare you speak to me like that? I am not a monster!"
"Aren't you?" he asked quietly. "As a Magical Girl, you're a monster waiting to be born. And even without that, think about it. The Incubators discarded empathy and emotion long ago. I can name a ridiculous amount of aliens out there who did that. Cutting their emotions out with a scalpel, or burning it out with genetic vector viruses, because they thought it weakness. Tell me, Homura…when was the last time you watched a sunset? Smelled a flower? Ate a well-prepared meal(4)? All for the simple joy of it?"
The questions cut into her. When was the last time she did any of those things? When did she discard those things as simply irrelevant to her mission?
"I met a man…the renegade time traveller I mentioned, the good one. He taught me many things." He then looked away from her, a glint of shame in his eyes. "And I needed the teaching. One thing he did teach me is to avoid sacrificing innocents to stop an atrocity. Sayaka, Mami, Kyoko…they didn't know what they were getting into. And they don't know about the true nature of the Magical Girl. If you want to focus on saving Madoka alone, then you must realise that I intend to save as many of them as possible."
"And how will you do that?" Homura said, taking her knife away, and getting off him. The two of them got to their feet, Moni rubbing the back of his head and wincing.
"I've…got a plan. Well, a plan in progress. Well, more like a repertoire of things we can do based on a very loose structure. Without your help, I won't be able to help everyone. And without my help, not only will you be doomed to repeat this again and again, but you may end up having this time loop, and everyone heavily involved in it, erased from reality. That's not a threat. The Agency takes a very dim view of time travel that takes place outside their purview."
He spoke so casually of such cataclysmic events. But Homura had seen Walpurgis Nacht tear up much of an entire city. It wasn't much of a stretch to imagine a callous destruction of people in such a way that they never existed before.
She still wasn't sure whether he could be trusted. But he was new to the timeline. A new variable. And truth be told, she could do with the help. In more than one version of the time loop, she had allied herself with the vicious Kyoko, recruiting her to prepare for Walpurgis Nacht. She hadn't trusted Kyoko herself, but she trusted the other Magical Girl's ability and strength.
"Then I will accept your offer, Moni. We will make this loop the last one," she said, with a conviction she hadn't felt for a very long time. Not hope. But conviction.
"Good," he said, smiling. "Now, we'd better make plans…"
After spending so long at the hospital, Moni was now walking down the now dark streets of the city, deep in thought. It had hurt him to lie to Homura, although these were lies of omission. Not just in the tale of how his world came to an end. No, he had reworked the tale just in case the Incubator was capable of listening in. Words that might have just leaked through to the Incubator from Homura's mind. Like Master. Or Doctor. Or Gallifrey. Or Logopolis.
But that was minor, compared to what he held back. For her own good. But also for his own.
He looked down at his hands. For a brief moment, he imagined them stained with blood. Red, blue, green, purple, orange…the blood of dozens of different species from dozens of different worlds.
He drew in a great, shuddering breath. He was paying for his mistakes. He was doing penance for his past. But the past had a nasty habit of catching up with him. As it seemed it was now.
He sensed it long before he saw it. Quickly, he changed his appearance with Block Transfer Computation. His nature was masked, but it didn't help to be more careful. His white hair became black, his red eyes became brown, and his features became a little more Asiatic.
Part of him smirked. He'd learned the trick from a Rutan who had been part of a small splinter faction. Natural shapeshifters, almost all of the Rutan Host were at war against the Sontarans, a militaristic clone race. At stake was domination of the galaxy. But there was a few dissident groups, within the Rutan Host at least. A splinter hive-mind that shared little of the war-like tendencies of their brethren(5). They had taught him techniques that helped with shifting his body language. Of course, superficially altering his body using BTC was different to the Rutans' more advanced shapeshifting, but every bit helped.
He saw the Incubator long before it saw or sensed him as he walked through a park. Of course, it was technically invisible, save to Magical Girls and candidates for Magical Girls. But anyone who needed to oppose them soon learned how to see the damned things. The fact that the organic body it currently wore was a Block Transfer Computation construct helped. It often wore this sort of body when dealing with humanoid species. The cuteness factor helped make its manipulations easier.
The damned thing was sitting under a lamppost, waiting for something. Or someone. It was sitting in a pool of light, its back to him. Oh, it was so tempting to launch a BTC attack at it right now. But to do so was to tip his hand too early. But he looked at the lamp, directly above the creature. Primitive electric lamp, with a heavy glass cover that could easily injure a person badly if it dropped.
Smirking sadistically, he used a very simple BTC ability. He called it Entropy. After the very thing that wiped out his people. He tweaked the molecules of the glass, making the glass around the edges where it was attached to the lamp housing disintegrate. With barely a noise, the heavy glass cover fell, its speed accelerated somewhat by Moni tweaking gravity just above the Incubator.
But it made enough of a noise that Kyubey looked up, just in time for its body to be squashed by the glass. The body exploded into gore in a fashion that was almost comical. It certainly amused Moni no end. But he kept the laughter within, knowing he'd have to find a place to settle for the night. And the Incubator would be around soon to eat its old body, if his experience was any judge.
Feeling cheered up already, Moni danced away. If Homura had seen that sadistic smirk, she would have been disturbed. Moni had shown many sides to himself, and now, he was wearing a smirk that would have given Kyoko Sakura a run for her money.
Kyubey wandered over to the corpse of its previous body. Picking the glass shards from the corpse, the creature then began to eat at it. Autocannibalism, it reasoned, was a conservation of precious resources.
Of course, it'd help if accidents like that didn't happen. There'd been one embarrassing situation where Kyubey had been run over by a car when a rather careless Magical Girl had dropped it in the heat of battle. Incubators claimed to have rid themselves of emotions, but Kyubey did feel a certain perverse satisfaction when that Magical Girl died in battle.
In truth, creatures who claimed to have rid themselves of emotions merely sliced away most, if not all. The Daleks' creator, Davros, had suppressed everything but fear, hatred, and anger. What joys a Dalek took were in furthering its xenophobic creed. The Cybermen got rid of many of their emotions, but some variations could simulate emotions in order to enhance their responses with their enemies. And truth be told, they could understand vengeance, spite, and superiority.
The Incubators were no different. Their emotions were shaved down to bloody nubs, and they pretended that the emotions weren't there, but they were. Blunted, eroded, but there.
What creatures like them failed to realise that it wasn't their emotions they were truly discarding, but their empathy. On Earth, it was Samuel Johnson who said that 'He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man'. It would be more correct to say that it was those who cut out their hearts did so for that reason.
They went down different roads, but they had a similar destination. Daleks, Cybermen, Incubators. They became obsessed with their own survival as an ends rather than a means, and saw emotions as an obstacle to that end. Survival is a means to an end. Beings like that, who view survival as an end rather than a means, cannot envision an end. Daleks believe that survival means the destruction of all living things. Cybermen seek to either assimilate, or destroy. And Incubators are, ultimately, thanataphobes(6) to an extreme degree: their survival is paramount. Above even that of the Time Lords. What will they do with their survival? Survive. They don't care that their survival is even more of a tautology than that of the Daleks or the Cybermen.
Kyubey would have frowned in mild concern if it was capable of such an expression. It had senses beyond that of any human. And it was certain that nearby was a slight but noticeable rise in ambient artron energy(7). Not that it was inexplicable: many things could cause such a rise, and it was a small rise after all.
But the Incubator also knew that it could mean trouble. Unfortunately, it couldn't tell where it had come from, or else it would investigate. In any case, it wanted to wait for Mami Tomoe, who was due to report here soon.
Little did the Incubator know, coincidence, or perhaps fate, had intervened…
CHAPTER 3 ANNOTATIONS:
1. A concept introduced in the new series of Doctor Who. In other words, parts of history that can't be interfered with in any way without catastrophic consequences. The concept was explored to its fullest and darkest potential in The Waters of Mars.
2. A term in statistics. A standard deviation is a measure of variation from an average. Here, Moni is using it to say that Sayaka's death shouldn't have varied in time so much (I'm assuming her various deaths in the timelines take place over at least several days).
3. Aliens made mostly from fat molecules. Made their appearance in Doctor Who: Partners in Crime.
4. A direct reference to a similar appeal, albeit a futile one, from the Doctor to a Cyberleader in Doctor Who: Earthshock.
5. Rutans look like green jellyfish with a hive mind, and can not only shapeshift, but also electrocute their victims. For Whovians complaining that I made up this splinter group, a similar concept appears in the Bernice Summerfield audio The Bellotron Incident.
6. Thanatophobia is fear of death.
7. Artron energy is the 'life force' of the Whoniverse. It not only works as part of the power systems for the TARDIS, but also is especially prevalent in time travellers. Hence Kyubey's concern.