The Game, By Transposition (Attempt #29)
"When I saw Miki-san laid out in her hospital bed, with all those tubes and... apparatuses plugged into her arm, I realized that she could've... just been gone. And she wouldn't have been able to do any of the things she'd ever wanted to do with her life. And she wouldn't have been happy about it, I'm sure. And I realized that could have just as easily been me. And I could've... and I—and that didn't... sit well with me."
Hitomi stood there in the parking lot, fiddling with her soul gem like it was a box of chocolates intended for a special someone, but one she couldn't quite bring herself to deliver. It glowed bright green, in defiance of the all-encompassing orange of the setting sun.
"And then?" I asked, though I already knew the end of this story.
By way of answer, Hitomi sort of held up her soul gem for a half second and meekly shrugged. "I wished for Kyousuke to be able to play the violin again."
Intrinsically, this was a different wish than Sayaka's, and I wondered if that was her exact wording, because it seemed super fucking dangerous to phrase it that way. Kyouko could attest to the fact that Kyubey was a maniacal genie who basically masturbated to the idea of twisting wishes to the full extent that the incubator ethics handbook allowed. Based on wording alone, I could picture Kyousuke on stage strung up like a marionette, his still busted arm stapled to a violin bow, as he is forced to perform Soviet folk music by the puppet master, Joseph Fucking Stalin. The music keeps getting faster and faster, and the Red Army Choir is laughing at him, and Stalin is shouting at him in Russian, even though he can't understand it, and he's just crying and whimpering "nyet..." and something about a girl he knew in kindergarten. That's how I would grant that wish if I were the Incubator, anyway.
Suffice to say, Sayaka was a bit more cautious and/or utilitarian with her wish to simply have his arm healed. He wouldn't have to pick up a violin again. He could do whatever he wanted with his arm. Sayaka the moderate, providing equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality in outcome.
Except that she really wasn't, and if you thought about it for two fucking seconds, you'd realize that. As far as alignment goes, she takes the express train on the diagonal from lawful good straight to chaotic evil, but you have to suspend that reality for the joke to work.
In response to Hitomi's dramatic, and entirely expected, announcement, I gasped a very self-indulgent gasp, making an about turn to face Mami, who was patiently waiting behind me.
"Oh, my fucking shit, Tomoe-senpai!" I exclaimed. "This totally explains a non-negligible number of things!"
That about did it for her. She crumpled to the ground slowly, one hand clasped tightly over her mouth as she vainly tried to contain great bellows of laughter. It wasn't working, and it looked like she was having a fucking seizure. I was on a roll.
"Oh, gosh, Akemi-kouhei-kun-chan!" She gasped, through unabated hysterical fits, "For instance, this explains why Kyousuke's arm wasn't completely scuttle-whomped at school today!"
I let out an unmitigated chortle and turned abruptly to hide my face. Fucking fuck. Tripled honorifics aside, she'd made that term up on the spot. That wasn't fair. Mami won this round.
Hitomi, a penguin, suddenly aware she was the last of her kind in a swimming pool filled with hungry seals, had little in the way of forming a rational response to any of this, and that was fine because she wasn't the main character of the story.
So, before she could begin with the arm flapping and the foaming at the mouth, I took charge.
"Alright, Tomoe-senpai," I said, in a bid to wrangle who really ought to have been the good cop in this scenario. "She's going to have a heart attack."
"Ahem," Mami uttered, still on the ground. In one smooth motion, she rolled onto her knees, sprung into a standing position, and did a little twirl in place, clasping her hands neatly behind her back.
"Not that I didn't appreciate the adulation," I said.
"Oh, I'm sure you did," Mami said bouncily. "I'll bet that stuffy, insecure anti-socialite inside you was just leaping for joy. They like me! They really like me!"
Oh, this puffy bitch. Why couldn't I hate her?
"It was funny, and I deserved it," I said indignantly.
"Yeah, say it again like you actually believe it this ti—"
"IT WAS FUNNY, AND I DESERVED IT," I repeated, with a totally even—well—a tone, anyway.
Hitomi audibly gulped.
"Right," I said. "I guess there's a few things we need to get caught up on."
()~~()
Over the last week or so, Mami had been taking Hitomi and Madoka out on expeditions on the mean streets of Mitakihara. Neither of them had what you might call a natural aptitude for this sort of thing, but Mami really sells it as a glamorous fucking pursuit. They spent an absurd amount of time on the edge of a literal total player kill, and Mami gave it all the weight of a stroll through an art museum, devoid of even the distant worry that some snobby sack of shit might skin up next to you, asking really coy questions like, "what do you think Jackson Pollock meant to say with these ejaculatory paint splatters on the canvas?" No. All these gals had to worry about was what in God's name they were gonna wish for, and what kind of cake they were gonna eat tonight.
Now, one thing naturally led to another, and given the circumstances, Hitomi really had no reason not to contract. She was well bred, and well versed in trying to do altogether too many things at once. This witch fighting thing wasn't marketed accurately as something that might necessitate you drop a couple of hobbies in order to pick up. She probably still thought it was something she had total control over, co-equal in importance with calligraphy and tea ceremonies. It certainly didn't hurt that she had a legitimate wish burning a hole in her pocket.
Soon enough, as sure as the sun rose every day, here we were, and it was time for the dress rehearsal.
()~~()
It sometimes surprises me to remember that Mami was basically my Qui Gon Jinn. Way back when I first contracted, I'd learned the ground rules from her, and she wasn't the worst mentor someone like me could've stumbled on. Actually, she was one of the only people teaching ground rules to anyone.
She liked to start by doing an audition of sorts where we could establish some fundamentals. Principally important was figuring out just what exactly your special power was. I can't speak for everyone, but when I contracted, I only had a vague sense of what I was capable of, but I sorted myself out in due time.
Because smart people feel stuff out.
I think most of the new girls go through an awkward phase where they can't adequately demonstrate their new skills, and that's fine, because A, most new girls don't actually need to show anyone what they can do, and B, there's a strong selection bias against girls that can't sort this stuff out on their own. Plus, Kyubey's there to help out, and he's usually got a good idea of where to start.
All that to say, this shouldn't have been very hard.
"Spin around for us," I said as supportively as I cared to sound. We were on the rooftop of a steel warehouse. Real big, lots of open space. It was Madoka, Mami, Hitomi, and I.
Hitomi, whom I'd been speaking to, stood about fifteen paces away from the rest of us. She was wearing what looked like a green French maid outfit. The bowtie that cinched it together was so uselessly big, it almost looked like a pair of wings. She had white, arm-length gloves and matching stockings. Her hair was tied in pigtails with poppy emerald ribbons. She had a wand that was really more of a baton, given how long it was. It had stars all over it, and she didn't seem to have a grasp of its center of balance yet.
Oh, and she had these hilariously oversized glasses for some reason too.
There were so many frills and ribbons, so much square footage of lace and satin. She was so completely not Hitomi but so exactly spot-on Hitomi at the same time.
"Okay..." Hitomi mumbled as she meekly twirled about.
Mami fervently chuckled a silent chuckle while her back was turned. "if nothing else, Hitomi, you look dynamite in that thing," she said. "Right, Akemi-san? Agree with me."
"Dynamite," I concurred. "I would know."
Hitomi looked back at us, twintails bouncing. "What do you mean 'if nothing else'? How am I supposed to take that?"
"Don't pay it any mind, mmkay?" Mami said. "Can you show us a little of what you can do?"
Hitomi cleared her throat. "I have... this book." From behind her back, she produced an encyclopedia-sized volume, mahogany, leather-bound, and sealed with a heart-shaped locket. I almost had a stroke as I started having uncontrollable thoughts about the inadequacy of my own notebook. I banished them quickly and wiped the sweat from my brow.
"What's so special about it?" I asked, leaning a bit heavily on the contemptuous side.
Not picking up on my irrational jealousy, Hitomi magicked the thing open, rendering the locket a useless cosmetic. "I think it's a spell book, or maybe an index, or like a bestiary of spirits," she said. "It's really weird actually. There are pictures in here of things I've seen before, and a lot that I haven't, with names, and a phrase of sorts that accompany them."
"Maybe you could give us an example," Mami said.
"Right," Hitomi said. She gingerly put her baton down, so she could hold the book with two hands. She flipped through a couple of pages, brow furrowed, then stopped. "So, this one is called 'The Executor'. The picture is of a fountain pen and the phrase is 'I heard her words and carried out her will.' but I don't know what that means."
"That's fuckin' badass," I muttered to myself.
Mami stroked her chin and pondered it. As well she should. This was actually fucking nuts. I had no fucking idea what this was.
Kyubey suddenly appeared from nowhere and hopped onto Hitomi's shoulder. "Perhaps you should try to summon one of these avatars," he said. "It seems likely that you are the matriarch this executor refers to."
Hitomi looked at Kyubey, then back down at the book, and then she blanked.
Seeing her friend was getting nowhere, Madoka demurely inched forward, cleared her throat, and said: "How might she try doing that?"
This was clearly indicative that both Mami and I were asleep at the wheel, or whichever metaphor best translates to lethargically chortling at the expense of the uninitiated, because Madoka was just about the last person in line for who should've been asking that question. Maybe just edging out in front of Kyubey, because it would've been really fucking obnoxious if he started asking himself leading questions.
"This phrase must be an incantation," Kyubey said. "Repeat it, as though it is a command."
Hitomi wasn't fucking capable of that and we all knew it.
"I heard her words and carried out her will," Hitomi muttered. "But… that makes it sound like I'm the executor. It doesn't make sense when I say it like that.
I had this one.
"Spin it," I said smugly, truly believing for a moment that I'd made any fuck-ass sense. "I mean, twist the… take the—uh… the roots—fucking—the fundamentals, if you understand my manner of speaking."
I really, really thought I had this one. Honestly, I knew what I wanted to say. It was on the tip of my tongue, but my prefrontal cortex was suddenly behaving like a scarcely lucid Bop-It toy desperately trying to hold down a phone interview seconds after shooting up.
"Take what y—take the words that you wanna say, and they're there already if you look, uh—take what you have t-there and—uh… invert it."
I was not wrong.
Kyubey got it, or maybe he didn't. Impossible to tell; his face hadn't changed in the slightest. That said, he was now far and away the most expressive member of the group, as everyone else looked like they were wearing paper bags over their heads that a 5-year-old had drawn their faces on, except without any of the facial features.
The full extent of my sharp insights may not have gotten across.
"You can think about it as sort of a call-response," said Mami after probably a thousand years of collective agony. "Like in music, you know?"
"I, uh..." Hitomi started. She gave a half-hearted nod, maybe. "Go on," she said.
That was a negative.
"Let's say I'm an air traffic controller, and you're a pilot," Mami posited.
"...Complementary," I uttered slowly, finally having some sense of what the fuck I'd been trying to say. "Directive..."
Hitomi ignored me and addressed Mami. "Okay," she said. "I don't really see where this is going."
"You're on final approach, and I say—" At this point, Mami furrowed her brow, held her soul gem up to her mouth like it was a radio, and squawked "Delta 2106, cleared to land on 22 right." She lowered her radio just a hair and peered at Hitomi expectantly. "Then you would say..."
Hitomi's eyes were as wide as saucers, and she said nothing for a few seconds, then, mirroring Mami, she picked up her wand, raised it to her lips, and half-whispered "Roger."
Mami's eye twitched.
"Ahem," came an assertive vocalization from the pink one.
She had her phone out and was using that as a radio prop, and this immediately made the others look silly. She was shaking like she'd run half a mile and then jumped out of an airplane, but her voice rang out clear enough.
"L-Landing on... on 22 right! Delta 21... s-something something..." Madoka eked out. It had taken a lot out of her, and good on her for trying, but I needed to point out some inaccuracies.
"When final approach tells you—"
"That's damn well close enough," Mami said, cutting me off.
I—well—fuck. Okay.
"So, there's a pattern here, Shizuki-san," Mami said. "I gave Kaname-san an order, and she repeated it back. So, what do you think you should say to get the executor to appear?"
The switch that flipped in Hitomi's brain was audible.
She let out a small excited gasp because she knew she had it. She looked down at the book and gripped her baton tightly, then said, "Executor, hear my words and carry out my will!"
With no further delay, a bright green flash erupted from the baton, and a swirling miasma wafted from the book. Some sort of energy was being focused onto a point on the ground between all of us. Hitomi's wand glowed brightly, and the transient essence took form.
All at once, everything died down, and in front of us, standing rigidly upright, was a fountain pen. A gold engraving on the side, spelled out in exquisite calligraphy, read "Der Vollstrecker"
Kyubey leaped down from Hitomi's shoulder and curiously circled the object. Then, seemingly satisfied, he plopped down next to it and said, "The Executor has heard your call, Shizuki-san."
()~~()
The Executor, as it was called, turned out to be a total dud. I mean, it was a magical fountain pen that had appeared out of thin air and never dried out, but that was it. Couldn't kill any witches with it; it was just a really cool pen.
The important thing, though, was that Hitomi now knew how to summon things out of her little book, and that was worth more than a thousand of those fancy fountain pens. Although admittedly, I would have murdered a bus full of school children to get my hands on one of those fucking things.
We spent a while figuring out summoning commands for each of the different 'avatars', as Kyubey insisted on referring to them, and we made a little bit of headway. Some of the entries were simple, like the pen.
Among others, there was 'The Collector', which seemed to be an enchanted bag of holding with the phrase 'I carried her burden, and kept her secrets'. Really super fucking jealous about that one, because not only did it duplicate a large chunk of the utility of my shield, the opening to this thing was elastic, so you could stuff just about anything in there.
There was also 'The Illuminator', which was an orb of light she could control with her wand. She could modulate temperature and luminosity at will, and after some tinkering, she found she could change the directionality of the light as well. The phrase was 'I banished the shadows where she walked.'
But there were also some, as we progressed through the tome, for which the summoning command wasn't readily apparent from the accompanying phrase. At least, not in the sense that we'd been thinking about these phrases so far.
For instance, 'The Deluge' was ostensibly some sort of water magic, but the phrase was cryptic and not easily transmuted into a directive: 'A roar like thunder, the ocean rises, and the ocean claims.' There being no even implicit reference to Hitomi herself, it was difficult for us to find an adequate structure for a command. The best we could think of was 'Deluge, rise and claim!' but a very unconvinced Hitomi was unable to manifest anything special with that phrase.
Still, further, there were darker and more obscure passages in the book. There was 'The Derelict' whose identity we couldn't quite put our collective finger on. The phrase did us no favors either: 'And of the ending we did not speak, nor of death, nor of darkness, and I was alone.' This was already enough to get the hairs on the back of our necks standing, but for some reason, we kept going.
On one of the last pages was an entry for 'The Null'. There was no picture, or maybe there was but we just couldn't see it. What was most perturbing was that there was no verse. There was nothing, and that was enough to convince us to call it a day.
()~~()
"There are actually a couple of things I need to go over before we do this," Mami said, idling in front of a vacant teriyaki truck. "And, since this is the real deal, I think it'd be charming if we actually drafted a plan or something crazy like that."
"Don't we normally just play this by ear?" I asked. "I mean what plans can we actually lay out here? We don't know what to plan for yet."
Hitomi, still in her street clothes, leaned in cautiously and said, "I'm sure there are general principles we can adhere to."
"There totally are," said Mami. "But I also happen to have fought this thing before. It didn't go well."
I wasn't usually on the receiving end of that line.
We were witch hunting, and Mami had tracked some fresh prey. After watching Mami and I deal with Gertrud, this was Hitomi's first real fight. It was getting dark, the teriyaki trucks of Mitakihara were all closed, and now here we were, standing in front of the entrance to Suleika's lair.
"Do continue," I said, although I already knew everything there was to know about this witch.
"She really likes the dark," Mami said. "She's incredibly powerful in the dark, actually. I don't mean to be overly dramatic, but that bitch nearly put me out of commission."
Kyubey hopped onto Mami's shoulder and started blabbering like a self-important toddler. "This witch is nearly invincible in perfect darkness, but even a small light, something as minor as a flashlight or a streetlamp, will dramatically reduce its combat effectiveness."
"Sounds good," I said. "I didn't bring my magical headlamp, I'm afraid."
"And you know what, Akemi-san?" Mami started, "That's going to be just totally okay because I thought we could have our novitiate here provide us a light."
We both looked at Hitomi expectantly. She stared blankly at us for a second and then it clicked.
"Oh!" she exclaimed. She transformed quickly and started violently swiping through her textbook. "Illuminator, please banish the shadows where I walk!"
A soft orb of bright green light instantiated in front of us.
"Thank you, Illuminator-san," Hitomi said.
Mami and I stared at the orb, wondering what it had done to receive such formality.
"That's awfully polite of you," I muttered.
"One should never be so rushed as to forego common courtesies," Hitomi said, beaming.
Mami and I kept looking at the orb, resisting the urge to make eye contact. We didn't say anything or acknowledge it in any way. That was just Hitomi.
()~~()
"Shizuki-san, more luminosity!" Mami yelled.
When you get a new party member who's under-leveled, you try to save all the juicy experience for them. So, we were dragging our feet a bit with this witch.
"Understood, Tomoe-Senpai," Hitomi responded, "Increasing lumens!"
The illuminator got brighter, detailing the viscous strands of pitch-dark plasma which licked at the ceilings and the walls. In response, the darkness receded into the corners, glomming together to escape the surging light.
Suleika's lair felt like a chamber of a medieval fortress carved into a mountain. We had entered through a large hallway, barren, as though the previous inhabitants had packed up their ornate decorations when they left. Her throne room was at the end of the hall, a giant chasm with no place to stand, save what you might call a stunted terrace at the mouth of the corridor. Hitomi was posted here, the idea being that she'd have an escape square if her position was challenged, while Mami and I were making use of makeshift ribbon platforms in the opposite corners, meta-directing the figurative aromatic.
Suleika occupied the vacuous center, and since we were so very clever, we'd herded her towards the ceiling by projecting the illuminator underneath her center of mass, cutting off any potential escape shenanigans.
It was only a matter of time now. The quivering tendrils at her extrema were waning, becoming brittle and crumbling, as though precious fluids were being redirected to preserve her central functions.
In a way, it was eerily human, but—like—fuck feeling sorry for witches.
"We've almost got it!" Hitomi cheered. Her many ribbons and hair tie-offs bounced as she hopped enthusiastically.
"Hooray," I said. "Mami, kill it."
Mami winked and did a little twirl. "Looks like it's past your bedti—"
She stopped mid-sentence—thank heavens—because all at once, everything went shit-fuck.
A small, previously unnoticed contingent of the darkness, which had been hiding underneath Hitomi's platform, suddenly sprung up and kamikazed into her face. It was vaporized instantly, but Hitomi's concentration dropped 100 meters to grade, and so did her book, which she'd lost her grip on.
The illuminator went totally dark. We did not have any other light sources.
I'd give it two seconds. It was irresponsible, but I was curious.
In those two seconds: the air seemed to congeal, a rumbling erupted from everywhere; I could've sworn it was laughter, I heard a smattering of musket fire, I was keenly aware that Suleika had explosively expanded to nearly fill the entire room, searching for her aggressors. On the tail end of those two seconds, I could feel cold tendrils of void make exploratory jabs at my feet, and I was about to call the experiment quits when I heard a strangled, gurgling shriek from Hitomi's direction.
"INFERNO, FUCKING BURN THAT BITCH!"
It was blinding. The heat was intense and immediate like I was standing in front of a stupidly big hair dryer with an annoyingly bright tactical flashlight attachment. An impressive, orange column of voracious flame filled the central chasm, originating from somewhere deep below.
I had it easy, though. Suleika was burning on the outside and the inside. She was the one shrieking now, and it was like this stupid fucking tactical hair dryer also had an array of two dozen oversized tea kettles set to boil, and they were all whistling at once.
It was awesome.
I could see Hitomi clearly. She was laid out, terrified, but her eyes were glowing from behind her giant spectacles. Not even figuratively. They were literally emitting light, burning a wild shade of emerald.
Mami didn't waste any time on a useless one-liner. I didn't even hear her shout TiroFinale this time. I just saw Suleika violently dissociate suddenly, and the shrieking stopped.
The room faded away, leaving us alone in an empty self-storage depot, a grief seed resting between the three of us.
I could see Mami on her knees practicing some box breathing. Hitomi couldn't stop rubbing her eyes.
Kyubey popped up from nowhere, it seemed, and scurried over to Hitomi.
"Shizuki-san," he said, observing her soul gem. "You need to purify yourself soon! You must have used a tremendous amount of magical energy in that attack."
He was right, her soul gem was a murky forest green with a few dark streaks traveling up the side of the vessel. She'd almost wiped herself out with that one.
Mami opened her eyes and stood up straight. She eyed the spot where the witch had been just a minute prior and calmly walked over to claim the reward.
"This, Shizuki-san," she said, kneeling to pick up the black relic, "is a grief seed." She stood back up and walked over to where Hitomi lay. "Since you put on such a spectacular display, I say you deserve to keep this one, which is just as well because you also need it the most right now."
Hitomi wasn't processing much of it, but she took notice when Mami held the grief seed up to her soul gem, sucking the dark aura right out of her heart.
"Do you see, Shizuki-san?" Kyubey said, ever the unsolicited tutorial bot. "This is how you, as magical girls, replenish your energy."
Hitomi nodded but didn't say anything for a while.
()~~()
"I just wanna square something away here," I said after Mami and I had dropped Hitomi off at her house.
"You just wanna square something away," Mami repeated.
"I sincerely doubt that the inscription under 'The Inferno' was anything remotely akin to 'I fucking burned that bitch'."
"You sincerely doubt that the inscription—"
"Thanks, Mami. I really feel like I've been understood."
She gave me a thumbs up. There was a pause.
"Thoughts?" I said.
"Well it's been clearly demonstrated that she doesn't need to say it exactly so every time," Mami said. "I mean, she quite provocatively interjected the word 'please' into her summoning command for The Illuminator, and that totally worked for her."
"Mami, any reasonable parsing protocol would know how to handle—"
"Reasonable parsing protocol, my ass, Akemi-san," she interjected. "We made that entire process up. Why are we even slightly surprised when it turns out to be more complicated than what we hashed out the other day?"
"If I may," came a small whiny voice in our heads.
I directed a mental barrage of disjointed curses at Kyubey, all of which he ignored.
"Shizuki-san's dominion over her avatars and furthermore her ability to summon them is not based in her ability to recite incantations," he said."They are a part of her soul and will respond to earnest feelings of intent. That they are bound in any way to the passages in the grimoire is entirely fallacious."
"Huh," I thought. Then, aloud, I said, "So they're sorta like dogs."
Mami crossed her arms and cocked her head to the side.
I continued, "Like, it doesn't really matter if you say 'come here, boy' to a dog if you're not confident it's gonna listen to you. Dogs can sense that shit."
"They are not dogs, Kuro-san," Kyubey said like a fucking dipshit.
"Ahem," Mami thought, clearing her mental throat, which was actually really weird. "So, when we told Hitomihow to read the commands back, she believed it, and that gave her the authenticity and confidence to successfully summon The Executor," she telepathed whilst performing charades concurrently with her flow of thoughts. "And each subsequent success reinforced her abilities, like a positive feedback loop."
I almost didn't catch anything she was thinking because I was busy watching her pantomime. She was reading, she was tapping her head like 'I got it!', then she gave a thumbs up and made a heart. I didn't really understand her motions for 'reinforce' but I believed them whole-heartedly.
Now she was just spinning her wrists in circles to indicate a 'positive feedback loop.'
I silently applauded.
"That's correct," Kyubey said, unaware of the theatrics on the ground.
"They're like dogs," I confirmed.
()~~()
It didn't matter what Hitomi said, as long as she meant it. She had dropped her book, and without that reference, her command must have come bubbling up from inside. When the room went dark, and that viscous, all-encompassing fear kicked in, the kind that makes you feel like your guts are all trying to escape through your larynx, Hitomi had called on one of her servants from a place of primal terror, and her feelings were sincere.
She was a bit shaken, no doubt, and for a little while, she played things safe. Whenever we went hunting, she would hang back a bit, not wanting to get too close. She wasn't able to consistently summon the more powerful entities, like The Inferno, as she still felt it was out of turn for someone like her to be dominating things like that.
Still, she provided a useful assortment of utility spells, and she seemed happy to help in whatever way she could, but underneath her placid exterior, I got the sense that she was afraid.
I think one of the main reasons Madoka hadn't contracted yet was Hitomi's insistence that she not go through with it, or at least put a hell of a lot more thought into it than she had. She didn't necessarily regret her decision as of yet, she was still in the realm of healthy introspection, but she was getting there.
()~~()
'Then came the blue one, and the blue one bore fruits of knowledge and calamity, and the blue one started FUCKING IT ALL UP, THE COCKSUCKING BITCH,' read my latest journal entry.
Sayaka had started meddling with my scheme in unforeseen ways, which admittedly, should have very well been foreseen.
Hitomi, sort of feeling self-important with this whole magical girl thing, and also sort of acutely aware of her own mortality, had mustered the swagger and bravado to make a run at the gimp. Kyousuke's arm was totally healed up, yes, but in my mind, he's a chronic cripple, ever bound to the hospital bed of mediocrity and pretention.
'A runt, ecstatically suckling at the teat of his own self-pity. A fucking shit.'
Hitomi was blind, her vision obscured by absurdly large glasses—which we found out didn't match her prescription, so she was actually fucking impaired—and the untainted longing of a middle schooler's heart.
She and Sayaka had been playing a very long hand of heads up Texas Hold-Em.
'Flop: check, check.
Turn: check, check.'
I'd decided that affording myself a little poetic license was worth organizing my thoughts about this thing.
'River... the river was different, volatile, the current fast and the surface opaque.'
I was actually infatuated with myself. It was unhealthy.
'Hitomi'seyes flickered, she mayn't have had the straight, but neither did Sayaka, and with top and middle pair to boot, surely the blue one had no way to call a bluff that looked like a value bet.
Hitomilanguidly fondled her chips, taking her sweet time. Then, after a brief pause, she pushed in. A meager fraction of her stack, easily callable if Sayakahit the straight, or a flush, or even what Hitomi herself had, but no, Hitomi had her limping in and drawing dead, no doubt.
Sayaka looked at Hitomidead in the eyes for a long moment.
"I am not a puppet," she uttered, shoving all her chips into the center. "Seven Hundred Sixty-Two Million, Four Hundred Seventy-Five Thousand. All in."
Hitomichoked back a sob. She'd been had. Wiping a single tear from her cheek, she mucked her hand.'
Oh, shit. That had gone too far. I'd really gotten carried away with that. For some reason "I am not a puppet" had seemed super badass and emotionally resonant, but it didn't read well at all.
To be brief, Hitomi had decided, as she often did, to give Sayaka an ultimatum regarding Kyousuke. The terms, as per usual, were thus:
Sayaka gets a 24-hour head start to confess her love for him. After this period has expired, it was open season, and Hitomi would swoop in.
There was to be no touching of the hair or face.
Sayaka usually crumples to the ground in a heap of despair at this point.
"Zombies," she cries. "That they are, and that am I. My love in Silence, undetected."
But today, she felt different; alive, not dead. Instead of feeling like a ghost, unable to transmit her love across the void, she felt like an online shopper, coerced by a last-minute liquidation sale on an item she was pretty sure she'd have ponied up for at some point anyway.
To paraphrase, with finality this time, the conversation went like this:
Hitomi said, "I'm in love with Kyousuke, and I know you are too, so I'll give you a day to confess before I give it a shot."
Sayaka replied, "Shit. Okay."
And Kyousuke said 'yes' because she'd asked.
()~~()
Just like that, our quaint little hunting party got sidetracked by a bitch in heat. Hitomi was not taking it well, and she did little to mask how she was feeling.
We'd tracked a familiar of Charlotte's down to a dimly lit parking garage in an aging commercial district. For reference, if you wanted to kidnap someone, anyone, this is where you'd fucking do it. The proverbial big rock candy mountain of the parking garages, the servants of despair version, and the candy was innocent people.
Not only had we tracked the thing down, but we'd slain it too, and nothing of note had popped out of its corpse. This was too bad and all, 'cause we'd been hoping we might score a grief seed, but it is what it is, and there's no use making a fuss over—
"WHY—WHY—WHY!?" Hitomi shouted, stomping on the ground in manic frustration. "WHY is there no grief seed AGAIN!?"
"I'm sorry Hitomi-chan," Mami said, her tone conciliatory. "Sometimes there just isn't, and there's nothing we can do about—"
"Didn't we wreck this thing?" Hitomi said, interrupting. "Did we not do it fast enough? Was I not good enough?" Her pet illuminator flashed repeatedly, emphasizing her key points.
"You were more than sufficient, Shizuki-san," Kyubey said, a compliment I'm sure he believed was high praise. "This one simply wasn't a witch, and there's nothing that you or any of us could have done about that."
"So, the real thing is still out there, and it's still hurting people?" Hitomi asked. "And here we are, and all we've done is wasted our time? Is that what—"
She turned away from us, clenching her fists and bunching her shoulders.
"I hate wasting my time," she said through gritted teeth. "What good am I if I waste my time?
A sort of green haze began to outline her body; a dark smolder, as though she was burning up. Her pigtails and ribbons seemed to deflate.
"If we're so special, then why haven't we found the witch?" She continued. "If I'm so powerful, then why couldn't I... Why did I let..."
She was shaking and becoming very green. Very disturbingly green.
Madoka, who'd been giving us some space till now, cleared her throat.
"Hitomi-chan, it's not your fault—"
"You're right Shizuki-san," I said, cutting Madoka off.
Everyone looked at me.
"We can't be satisfied with what we've done here," I said. "We have to find this witch. Tonight."
Mami's eyes narrowed a bit, clearly wondering why I was so dreadfully off-brand at this moment.
"If we don't find it, that thing is gonna find some poor soul out there and gobble it up," I pushed. "I say we don't give up just yet. How does that sound, team?"
Hitomi seemed to mellow a bit, or at least she'd halted her transformation into the fucking Jolly Green Giant. She definitely wasn't happy, but she was game. That much I could tell from the stoic slate of nothing on her face and the absent-minded baton twirl she did behind her back.
"Alright." She said.
Madoka gulped.
"Wonderful!" Mami chimed. "Alright, girls, let's head back down to street-level and see if we can pick anything else up!" She wasn't actually looking at me, but mentally, she was staring bullets into my skull.
"You'd better have a damned good explanation," Mami thought at me as she roused the troops.
"I'm sure you've had to talk plenty of people down from the top of buildings before, Mami."
"She's in love, she's upset, and she's wrong. Why are you encouraging her?" She asked.
That was correct, and maybe I was just overreacting, but I had a better read on the pulse of the situation than Mami did, or at least I thought so.
"She needed to be right about something just now, and she still needs to feel useful," I thought. "Hitomi doesn't deal well with any perceived loss of control. She's just as anal as Sayaka, maybe more."
"You're talking about them like they're puppets, and what does Sayaka have to do with this?"
Right. Thought I was talking to my journal for a bit there. That was a slip-up.
"That's, uh... well—"
"Never mind that," Mami said, butting into my thoughts. "A witch hunt takes hours, Akemi-san. What the hell are you thinking?"
This, I had a cogent answer for, as I was a snoop. I'd spent some extra-curricular time tracking the movements of the witches in the city. Interestingly, the Hitomi's contract variation was causing some major alterations in their typical migration patterns. Charlotte, as it happened, was going through some strange existential crisis for some reason, and was taking refuge in a nonstandard place. At least for her.
"We'll want to check by the baseball stadium."
"And how is it you arrived at that?" Mami asked.
"Surveys, physics, statistics, a little bit of calculus," I thought.
"And I'm sure there's a reason you didn't tell us right away."
Yeah, there was. Because I didn't want to seem like I knew too much. Because I didn't want to fuck up this timeline before I knew all I needed to know about it. Because, in the big rock candy mountains, the jails are made of tin, and you can walk right out again as soon as you are in.
"More calculous," I thought. "Really obnoxiously hard calculus."
TO BE CONTINUED
A/N: This took a long time to publish mostly because it's actually less than half of what I currently have written. I had intended to hit a few specific major points in this chapter, but it just kept getting longer and longer, so I needed to split it up. The good news is the wait for the next chapter probably won't be very long. Probably.
