EDIT, 12/15/21 - Chapter has been revised. A/N updated.

I hate pain.

It's unpleasant. It burns. It can break your focus. It can swallow you up, and lock you into thinking about nothing but itself, and a million other bad things. It can tear you apart, and leave you a broken husk of what you once were. It can do all that and more.

But what I hate most about pain isn't about anything that it does. No, the thing I despise about pain more than anything else, is that it signifies that somewhere along the way of the long, arduous journey that is your life… you screwed up. It signifies that you made a mistake.

It could be something as simple as not noticing the cooktop you laid your hand on was hot. Or something as big as blowing your chance at the career you've always wanted. Whatever the cause, or causes may be, if you feel pain, that's how you know you've fucked up.

And there are very few things that feel worse than realizing that.

So, when I woke up in a patch of wet grass on the morning of May 16th, with a splitting headache and a body that felt like it had just been dragged through a meat processing factory, you can bet that I was quite possibly the least happy camper in the history of camping. And perhaps the history of happiness, as well.

What the hell happened last night?

Thinking on its own hurt like hell, but it was nice to know that my brain was still with me. I didn't know what I'd do without it. Stupid shit, probably.

Opening my eyes led to them getting stabbed with blurred, featureless rays of light. Hissing at the discomfort, I snapped them shut again, lifting a sore hand up to massage the lids and rub away any lingering tiredness. When that ended up not working as well as I hoped, I sunk further into the grass and wallowed in the obvious fact that this was going to be one of those days.

I laid there for a while, opting to wait out the typical sluggishness and vampiric reactions to the sun that mornings tended to inflict on teenagers like myself. This worked well enough that I was eventually able to keep my eyes open, giving myself a significantly less blurry picture, and move my limbs without feeling like I'd just done a hundred reps on every exercise machine in existence. Shortly after, I discovered that I was lying next to a large white building, presumably located in some kind of city if the numerous skyscrapers present in the background were anything to go by.

Trying to stand up and walk was a whole different beast, though. Just getting my feet under me was a challenge, with my muscles utterly unable to stop trembling. Actually moving around was damn near impossible. A mere two steps was enough for me to lose my balance and collapse back on the ground, whereupon I learned that failure unsurprisingly tasted like dirt and small greenery.

I resolved not to let this simple task that I'd been able to do since childhood beat me, though. These were literal baby steps, damn it, and I was better than this. Lo and behold, after suffering through three more falls accompanied by copious amounts of mental swearing, I was able to make it to a nearby bench.

Practically crashing onto the wooden piece of public furniture, I hunched over, propping my elbows on my legs and paying particular attention to the way they were still shaking slightly.

Dealing with that could come later, though. Right now, it would probably do me better to think. The now minute twinges the action sent bouncing around my skull was a sacrifice I could afford to make to take stock of everything.

This doesn't look like anywhere I've ever been.

Whatever building I was next to was ringing one or two bells, however. Like it was a place I'd seen before, but through a picture or video and not personal experience. There were a few signs around, both paper and metal, but my eyes still hadn't quite finished adjusting themselves yet, and their contents were left fuzzy and completely indecipherable. Yet, I couldn't get it out of my head that something about them was off.

Regardless, I would likely be better-served waiting until my body could properly follow my commands to a degree I was used to. While I did that, I figured I might as well try to puzzle out why I was here in the first place.

Which I unfortunately had very little to go on.

I know I went to sleep in my bed last night. Everyone was in their rooms, the house was locked, absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Can't think of anyone who'd do this to me either seriously or as a prank. That might just be a small sample size talking, though.

The concept of having friends wasn't one I'd entertained in years. But you'd be hard-pressed to ever catch me moping about that. I was perfectly fine staying in my little bubble.

Must've been some kinda break-in. Dunno why they decided to haul a body off instead of something more valuable, or why they'd dump me here afterwards, but I don't see anything more plausible.

I took a moment to thank my lucky stars that I'd hit the sack fully clothed, and that my captors hadn't stripped me. Not having the motivation to dress in something more nighttime-appropriate or even taking my shoes off had ended up saving me a whole lot of misery. Having a black hooded zip-up jacket, black t-shirt, gray long pants, and black sneakers meant I was suited for just about every weather condition a city like this could throw at me.

...hm. Lotta black in there, actually. I haven't been coming off as goth or emo or anything like that all this time, have I? Nah, no way. I'd need makeup or style products for that.

The only items I was wearing that weren't some shade of black were the white socks hidden behind the shoes and pants, and you couldn't even see them most of the time. It was a good color. Worked well with pretty much anything, or so my mom had told me a while back. She did also say that wasn't an excuse to just wear black, but I'd never cared much for fashion, and if she said it worked, then who was I to say otherwise?

I was abruptly broken out of my clothing-related musings by the sound of a set of automatic doors sliding open. Lifting my head up, I focused my vision on the entrance of the building, which someone had just walked out of.

This specific someone was honestly quite eye-catching. Long, silky black hair that almost seemed to shine in the morning light, rolling down her back and framing her face with a pair of bangs that went down a little past her cheeks. Deep purple eyes, set in a youthful face that seemed sharper and harder than it looked at first glance. Confident posture, gaze straight ahead, measured but brisk pace, powerful strides. All entirely at odds with her minute feminine frame. Whoever she was, this girl was on a mission.

I was also beginning to suspect that I had probably seen her in a picture or video, too. Those bells the building had been ringing had gotten a lot louder, and had recruited more bells the moment I'd caught sight of her.

Then, all of a sudden, she stopped, and her eyes began drifting. When they zeroed in on mine a moment later, I caught up with my actions and flinched in as much of a subdued manner as I could, having realized that I'd been staring at her long enough for it to be considered creepy by most people.

My pupils reflexively darted around in all directions for a few seconds, trying to convince her that I hadn't just been acting like a low-key stalker before I clamped down on them and forced them to look forward. I was already past the point of no return; the only thing left to do now was own it. So I lifted a hand up and used it to direct a tiny wave at the girl, pairing it with the best smile I could manage in my current rattled state. Which ended up giving me an expression that screamed 'I'm trying my best to act innocent because I got caught red-handed and I know nothing I can do will salvage this but just let me have this comfort action, please.'

She narrowed her eyes in response, scrutinizing my obviously-suspicious actions, and it was here that I discovered that something about that gaze of hers just terrified the living hell out of me. If I had to describe it, I'd say it was like staring down an apex predator, or a professional hitman, or a serial killer. The kind of thing that could end your life about as easily as it could do something like breathe.

But in the end, she took what I'd done as the closest thing to a spoken apology she could get out of me and turned away, continuing down the pathway until she left my field of view. I took the chance to finally air out the breath that I'd involuntarily been holding in for the last thirty seconds, reasonably convinced that the danger had passed.

Oh, whaddaya know, the shaking's worse now. Thanks. For that.

At this point, I figured trying to stop the jitters was a lost cause. So I instead decided to check the signs again, now that my vision seemed to be back up and running at twenty-twenty. God only knew how that number hadn't dropped yet considering all the stuff I did at home that was apparently supposed to wreck them, but I wasn't going to question it.

Either way, I finally found an explanation for why something about the signs had felt weird.

...why the fuck are they all in Japanese?

There was not a single character of English to be found on any of them. All of the little thin strips of paper and sheet metal I could see were covered in hiragana, katakana, and the infinite abyss of calligraphic hell known as kanji.

This carried quite a few unfortunate implications about my current situation. Implications that were reinforced when I looked at the surrounding city again, taking note of the architecture on display. The tightly-packed, advertisement-flashing, distinctly urban Japanese architecture.

Oh, no. Please don't tell me this is what I think it is.

I directed my attention down at my legs again, unwilling to further confirm my suspicions. Upon doing so, my attention was called to something else.

Is there something wrong with my chest? I don't think any kind of exercise can get pecs to grow this large… wait a second.

Something was missing. One of my hands began drifting towards my crotch, before I registered what exactly it was that I wasn't feeling anymore.

Oh, sweet lord in heaven.

My eyelids squeezed themselves shut, and my hands barreled into my pants pockets. The changes wouldn't become real if I didn't touch them, or see them. They weren't there. This wasn't happening. I was going to open my eyes again, and this would turn out to all be some sort of fever dream. In three, two, one, now.

Nothing changed. I was still sitting on the bench, next to the building. I was still a girl.

Damn it.

Switching gears yet again, doing my utmost to avoid confronting reality, I pulled out the objects my hands had incidentally felt when I'd shoved them into my pockets. In one of my palms was my phone, surprisingly, which thankfully seemed to bear no changes whatsoever that I could see upon a quick boot-up. Save for one oddly specific exception.

Where'd the Magia Record app go?

I hadn't touched it since the NA servers had been shut down, but I'd never deleted it. The app did still contain assets that let me view the costumes of all the characters I'd obtained since I started playing. The game itself had been fairly enjoyable, aside from the gacha-typical grinding, and the story had been surprisingly decent for a product of its kind.

Keeping the thing's icon on my phone had been a neat little memento of the time I spent on a mobage plot that had no right being as decent as it was. But now it was gone, and I guessed I just had to accept it.

Ah, well. That's pocket change compared to everything else that's being piled on me. Now, what's this?

In my other hand was a folded piece of paper. A very folded piece of paper. It called to mind the image of old art classes, when we'd had to fold up standard eight-and-a-half-by-eleven pieces into tiny squares to make easy crease-outlines for panels of a comic strip. I'd always been fond of them; they were nice opportunities to sharpen my sardonic wit and sarcastic nature. Or what counted as them, anyway.

Not a lot of other people ended up liking those parts of me. I could recall more than a few times when my token attempts at being friendly with my classmates ended in me unintentionally pissing someone off thanks to my tendency to rib them. Perhaps watching the first Iron Man movie at such an early, impressionable age wasn't such a good idea after all.

Ha, right. And Tony Stark's not hilarious. Those guys wouldn't have been grade-A friend material, anyway.

I began the process of unfolding the paper, restoring it to its former glory. Or as much of its former glory as it could maintain, being as creased-up as it was.

Then I actually read what it had printed on it, and landed a front-row seat to the show of how my life was shattered into a million pieces, and put back together in a hideous mockery of what it once was. Kinda like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, only about ten to the power of infinity times worse.

Let's go back to what I said about pain earlier. Now, I'm not saying that pain is entirely a bad thing, because it's not. Pain's one of the best teachers there is at telling you what not to do. It does everything it can to make sure that once you do make a mistake, you never make it again. That's all well and good.

But there are some mistakes out there that pain can't help you with.

Mistakes like failing to dodge a knife thrown at your heart. Mistakes like losing your footing next to a sheer drop. Mistakes like pissing off a vindictive bastard of a convict three days before he breaks out of prison.

Mistakes that, unless you're Lady Luck's significant other, you only ever get to make once.

Those are the worst kind of mistakes. Not just because they're the ones that hurt the most, but because that pain that comes with them is ultimately worthless. After all, there's no sense in learning how to avoid something you can only do once if you've already done it.

Compared to most other people, I never had a lot of reasons to worry about making these mistakes. I wasn't one to live a particularly dangerous life. I wasn't a soldier. I had no interest in a driver's license. None of my hobbies involved handling sharp objects. The only sport I played was golf. Hell, on the whole I did my best to avoid leaving my house, period. The most life-threatening things I did back in my old home was go on Scout-sanctioned hikes, and unless you were careless to an absurd degree, you'd be hard-pressed to get more than a scraped knee or a twisted ankle even if you did end up slipping on loose dirt.

But now… well. See for yourself.

For the eyes of Audrey Erryn only, to be read on the 16th of May, of the year 2046.

Hello. I've got a lot of questions to answer for you and nowhere near enough space, so I'll try to keep this brief and stick to the important bits.

First off, I'm talking to you. The tall girl in the black jacket, with the crazy brown hair. Yep, you're not a guy anymore, suck it up. Your dick's a small price to pay for magic privileges. See the name up at the top? You better, 'cause it's yours now.

Your cover story is as follows: you're a senior-year high school student, and your parents have sent you to Japan to have fun while they put their noses to the grindstone. You've finished all your major projects, so your school let you bail on graduation. You got here yesterday and set yourself up, then left your wallet in your room when you left to explore this morning. Your apartment's address will be listed at the bottom of this letter. You also have 2 months' worth of unlimited data left on your phone.

Next up, some background. If nothing went wrong, you should be reading this on the date listed above. That also means that if you haven't moved yet, you should be right next to Mitakihara City's General Hospital. Yes, THAT Mitakihara City. You're not in California anymore, bucko.

This is supposed to be Homura's last loop, by the way. Timeline 5. Canon territory. Whatever you want to call it. That means no Oriko, no Kamihama bullshit, none of that gaiden stuff. Just pure, vanilla Madoka. And Different Story, for obvious backstory purposes. That's it.

Lastly, your mission. You've been tasked with the objective of keeping all 5 members of the Holy Quintet alive and well up until the defeat of Walpurgisnacht. Any methods or strategies or whatever you come up with are fair game so long as none of the girls die from them. Knock them out and lock them up, harden them, work with them, do whatever you think is necessary. Just make sure none of them lose their lives in the process, and you're golden.

Your reward for succeeding will be determined at the conclusion of your mission. Failure to complete this task will incur the penalty of multiversal erasure. Harsh, I know, but you're sure as hell motivated now, aren't you?

That's almost all I can write here without turning this into a test cheat-card, so I'll leave you with this: you've got one shot. Homura won't see you again if she resets. So don't fuck up, huh?

Good luck, Audrey. And never forget—

Being meguca is suffering.

I latched on to the mention of a place to stay like a lifeline. Everything else could wait until I had a bed to sleep on. I mashed the address into my phone as best I could with hands like a cocaine addict's, fumbling through typo after typo until I got what I wanted. The place wasn't far from where I was; I could probably make it in fifteen, twenty minutes at my usual pace.

I stuffed the note back into my pocket, doing my best not to focus on the quickly-widening pit in my stomach.

Push it down. Not here. Not now. You can hold yourself together until you get there, can't you? C'mon, on your feet.

Standing up, I stumbled forward, unprepared for the extra inertia my upper body now carried.

Right, new center of gravity, okay. No big deal, just gotta get used to it. Who gives a shit about a pair of boobs, anyway? Couldn't be me.

That didn't mean I was gay, by the way. I was straight. Or, well, lesbian now, I supposed. But wasn't that the same thing as being gay? Or was that homosexual nowadays? Wait, did this whole thing mean I was trans now, or did the whole lack-of-consent part of the change invalidate that? Perhaps a google search on terminology was in order in the near future.

Not now, though. I had to get moving.

Get home first, then you can have a breakdown. Figure out a way to shoot the fuckoff-huge singing telegram jester asshole 'til it dies later.

I lurched off like a drunkard, caring less and less about the falls I took on the way. They made for good practice. Practice I would need.

Don't fuck up.

All things considered, it looked like pain and I were about to get really close, really fast.

A/N: For those of you wondering where I've been these last few months... well, this isn't quite it, but it counts for one of them.

In any case, hello. I got the idea for this story about a month ago, around when I first started playing Magia Record. From the limited experience I've had with this fandom, it seems that it's not really a stranger to the Self-Insert genre, but it is a bit of a stranger to one that's also a gender-bender. So I went 'hey, why not? It might be just what I need to replenish my motivation to work on my other stories.' Then it spiraled wildly out of control, and suddenly I found myself over 15,000 words deep into a project that was never meant to get this big over the course of thirty days. So then I just thought 'well, hell, I've done this much, might as well go all-in,' and here we are at the introductory chapter of 'Diversis Mundi Magia Actum,' Latin for 'Different World Magic Chronicles' (or technically 'Acts,' but there's not really a word in the Latin dictionary that directly translates to 'Chronicles,' so I had to settle for this). Truthfully speaking, it was probably a mistake to use a title produced by google translate, but I'm not very well-versed in Latin myself, so sue me.

Either way, there you have it. In the old author's note, I mentioned that I had little more than a rough outline for how things were going to play out. But now, I am proud to say that I still have no idea what I'm doing. But flying by the seat of my pants seems to have worked fine so far, and if it ain't broke...

Anyway. Feedback of all kinds is appreciated, and if you have any issues with anything, feel free to let me know (as long as it's not 'self-insert, reeee!' or some other silly and purely subjective complaint, including but not limited to: poor character interpretations, wacky pacing, bad plot structure, cringeworthy dialogue, contradictory themes, overuse of tropes, idiot ball moments, and everything that could imply that I actually do have absolutely no clue what I'm doing whatsoever and not simply playing up my incompetence for a spot of comedy).

That was a joke, by the way. Please take any excuse you can find to rip me a new one. Seriously, I can't survive without reviews, please, I'm starving, I need to be criticized, for God's sake, pLEASE-

...ahem. See you in chapter 2.