"This self-centredness is ingrained in human nature. It can be overcome but it needs constant conscious effort to overcome it." -Tim "Exile" Shaw
2008 was a long year.
By the end, people were rather fed up with it as they might have been before with lice or heavy traffic. Not that they particularly disliked the year - they recognised its merits, they understood it served its purpose as a follow-up to 2007, and so forth - but it lingered in a frustrating way. Most people had figured out the point back in May or June, and the remainder thereafter just seemed like worthless filler.
"We kind of get the gimmick now, it's not really that funny anymore," everyone thought. "It's hard to believe that the same inexorable progression from past to future that would give us such masterworks as early-mid February and last Tuesday would deliver something so mediocre."
The passage of time gave eventually, as it was wont to do. "Fine," it conceded, "you can have 2009, but just this once."
And it was so.
2009 still a few hours away, but its looming presence palpable, four and a half million pairs of eyes and ears took in the pyrotechnic display over the heart of Sydney. One pair of eyes about ten kilometres North belonged to Marie Crawford. The other pairs of eyes belonged to other people, but that much wasn't out of the ordinary.
Marie sat out on the balcony to her family's Seaforth home, her fingers drumming nothing in particular on a small iron table next to her. Throughout the city, thousands of people clung to annually-incurred superstitions of turning over a new leaf, or of discarding the old one. Many more simply saw it as an opportunity to drink, try to get with somebody, fail miserably, go home, and pass out. A few took it as an opportunity to attend celebrations from which they derived no enjoyment, hosted by people they didn't respect, to obey lines of social etiquette they only pretended to understand. Marie grinned slightly at a deep contempt she harboured for all of them. These people stood at crossroads in their lives, held there by a centre of gravity hanging on the brink of an uncertain future. If not, then that was what they chose to believe. Marie, however, was entirely certain about one thing:
She was really, really bloody bored.
Her parents had left the house to she and her brother - they were out at a party with their peers in the upper class, all of whom were making a conscious effort to pretend not to hate each other. At that moment, in fact, her mother contorted a grimace into a smile while a friend from high school gushed to her about the beauty of a child-free life, while her father disguised a wince at hearing how the man to his side pronounced "hors d'oeuvres".
Her brother, not too long thereafter, had snuck away to a party of his own, with little more than a string of monosyllabic grunts farewell. This had left the house to Marie and the Incubator. That much was fine by her. She hardly cared to share a room with any other member of her immediate family, and did, quite despite herself, enjoy his company.
She listened out to the telltale pitter-patter of his approach on the tiled floor behind her. "Another year, and still no contract," he thought aloud in the most literal way possible. "You continue to prove yourself full of surprises."
"Damn, dude," she groaned. "Where have you been all night? I've been getting lonely out here, and the party down the street is playing Walking On A Dream again. If I have to listen through it one more time, I'm going to lose it."
"It's generally a very low-activity night." He punctuated his statement by leaping onto the table - an action feline enough to convey a shrug (any sufficiently feline action carries the same meaning as a shrug). "Too many adolescent girls are intoxicated to form contracts right now, so we usually leave this night to recuperate and prepare for the year ahead."
"Seriously? You're ever the gentleman, huh."
He smiled. "Humans would think it impolite if we formed a contract with someone who has reduced control over their mental faculties. That much, I suppose, makes sense, but it does beg the question as to why humans recreationally poison themselves to deliberately hinder their decision-making skills."
Marie shrugged. "Welp. Like you always say, it can't be helped."
"It can't be helped," he concurred, with the well-practiced illusion of enthusiasm.
Marie slumped elbow-first on the table forcefully enough to knock over a novelty sparrow-shaped candlestick which had otherwise sat undisturbed and unused in the middle of the table from the moment her mother had bought it. The motion-sensitive light in the corner behind her flared to life.
"So, what? When you realised I was sober you came here? You don't think I'm gonna make a contract anytime soon, right?"
"Admittedly, you've held out in the face of our offer for an anomalously long amount of time-"
She scoffed. "What, three years? Four?"
"Four years, correct." He righted the candlestick with his ears, eye contact unbroken all the while.
"Wow."
"...But where emotions are involved, it would be a bad idea to assume we can extrapolate the future from past results. Besides, the threads of fate have only tied themselves tighter around you lately. You have so much potential now that you'd have to be a fool not to at least try finding a constructive use for it."
"Is that so?" She cracked a sheepish grin.
He didn't move in any manner that would suggest an acknowledgement of the question.
"What changed?"
"Developments in the global economy." He strutted the circumference of the table around to her. "Normally, in older eras of humanity, the power you wield over the lives of others would be reserved for duchesses and queens. However, what with the vast shift in power structures worldwide in the last century, that power now belongs to heiresses to real estate quasi-empires like you."
"You mean capitalism?"
"From what I can understand of the admittedly very human situation regarding housing in the United States, yes! Your parents are taking advantage of the financial collapse over there to amass more power in its market while essentially remaining unaffected here."
"Damn. How much studying of 'human situations' did you have to do just to give me that spiel?"
"None at all. I've sealed contracts with enough humans directly affected by such matters to understand secondhand."
"Oh," mumbled Marie. She was too rich to dwell on that.
"So... you got any resolutions, li'l guy?" She cleared a dry chuckle from her throat and stroked his head.
"We have reason to believe we're close to determining the cause of the dark energy discrepancies in our latest measurements. We intend on doing so as soon as possible, and the next three hundred and sixty-five days would be a likely time frame for our investigation to conclude."
"Oh, good for you!"
"Good for the observable universe, if all goes well."
"Yeah, that too."
She looked out at the city skyline. She almost missed the feeling of being a child, where each year seemed to last an eternity and a new one was something to be celebrated. Like, really, *actually* celebrated. Back when she was, like, four or something, and her parents would take her down to the edge of the city to watch the fireworks from the roof of the family car. The key word, however, was "almost", and she knew her past self's blindness to the less enjoyable parts of life were not so much an indicator of their absence as they were the fact that a four-year-old is rarely an optimal judge for the quality of living.
This was a sign of Marie's dangerous closed-mindedness. The body of the Incubator before her, as it happened, had only been manufactured four years ago, and he was far more capable of assessing her happiness than she was.
"And you?" Kyubey implored in a display of rhetoric that could bring the depths of the uncanny valley to a limp sag.
"Hm?" Marie blinked at him for a moment. "Oh, right. You mean a resolution?"
Again, he made no indication that he had so much as heard her.
"Yeah, I think this year I'm gonna form a contract, become a magical girl, and fight witches in exchange for a wish."
"I'm sure that were I capable of feeling emotion, I would have found such a joke deeply humorous."
"Thanks, Kyub. You're a real one."
He tilted his head to one side. "That said, you've almost reached biological maturity, after which point your body will be firmly locked in as a human one. Therefore, if you did have any intention of fulfilling a wish, this year is the last chance you'll have to do so. Beyond that, your emotional output will no longer be of any use to us."
"Shit. This is it, huh?"
"That's correct," he nodded as matter-of-factly as a prideless being could.
"Man, where the hell has the time gone...? Everything feels like it changes so quickly, you kn- well, I guess you've been around for eons, so obviously *you* know."
"All a common feeling that comes with your stage of life. Of the millions of adolescent girls we have sought out in our time on Earth, almost all have shared the sentiment."
"That's not entirely reassuring, actually."
"It wasn't meant to be. It was a fact I thought you might have found interesting." He smiled again.
"I didn't," she shrugged.
"That was a distinct possibility as well."
Dissatisfied with the quality of conversation, and still bored enough to generate sufficient emotional energy to tack a few billion years onto the lifespan of the stars in the Local Group, Marie turned and walked indoors, downstairs to the kitchen. Kyubey ran beside her to keep up. It was cooler in than out, although Marie didn't really mind the summer evening heat. It was more the humidity that frustrated her, always leaving her lips dry and her hair a mess. That and the mosquitoes, but she'd had the foresight to plant a couple of mosquito coils along the balcony before sundown.
"So. Remind me... what's dark energy, again? I get that it's two thirds of the observable universe-"
"-and counting," the Incubator interrupted.
"Right. But what does it *do*?"
"Simply put, it speeds up the expansion of the universe. This is problematic to our ends because the faster the universe expands, the more thinly spread all its energy becomes, and the quicker the cosmos dies a cold, empty death."
"Ah, gotcha. That's... very bad." She threw open the refrigerator door, the pale glow of its interior light barging forcefully into the darkness that had found a home in the otherwise unlit kitchen.
"It's pessimal," he nodded, "and it gets worse by the moment for reasons we don't understand. We hope your species thusly understands the inconvenience."
"What, your slaughter of teenage girls the world over, for hundreds of thousands of years?"
"Millions, actually. It is admittedly very inconvenient."
Marie fished out a bottle of sparkling grape juice from the fridge and shut its door behind her. The darkness in the room went back to minding its own business. "Fair enough, I guess." She pulled a glass from a cabinet under the kitchen bench, filled it partway, and sipped it thoughtfully.
"Eugh! It's flat as hell..."
"What appears to be the problem?" Kyubey cocked his head to one side with practiced mechanical precision.
"It says it's 'sparkling', but it's lost all its sparkle! The juice is *lying*, Kyubey!"
"You can blame entropy for that."
She put her glass down by a pair of salt and pepper shakers shaped like embracing lovers and scanned the darkness for a pair of luminous red eyes to glare her frustrations into. "C'mon, dude. You don't mean...?"
"You know, we have a common dissatisfaction with this entropy, and a mutualistic solution to it."
"Can I blame entropy for you being a snide little bitch who needs to have a comeback to everything I say?"
"Absolutely. In fact, there's a very fast way you can make me stop."
"...Jeez. How many times have we had this conversation before?"
He turned his head to an odd angle for a moment, before his glare snapped right back onto her. "Three hundred and thirteen."
Marie nodded, returned glass to hand and, with a feeble gyration of the wrist, conjured an anticlockwise flow of a pensive absentmindedness. She lost herself in thought. She bit her lip, allowed herself a moment of quietude, and downed the drink once partly consumed by entropy, now wholly consumed by her.
"There's a high-class witch hunt to the southwest of the Central Business District," the Incubator interjected into her solace. She half-choked on the upsettingly inert concoction at the reminder that he was still there at all. "It seems to be connected to a loose end we've been trying to tie up for weeks. If you want to go and watch it, I'd estimate the window of time to get there hasn't closed yet."
Marie beamed. "For real? Why didn't you tell me earlier? Let's go!"
She was ever the thrill seeker, in the same way that an extreme sports player or storm chaser was. What set her apart from the pack, however, was that she found excitement in watching magical girls do battle against witches. Far more dangerous than most, of course, but she had learned over time to prepare for almost every eventuality.
Up in her bedroom, she double-checked the contents of her bag she carried to such occasions. A spare house key, a Swiss Army knife, a small first-aid kit, a skateboard helmet, two kneepads, and a dogeared paperback notebook were nothing to write home about, of course, but they proved themselves useful more often than not. What's more, she had a lacrosse stick. An ENCHANTED lacrosse stick! She tossed it from hand to hand, its weight as natural a channel for her strength as a third arm. With the non-magical variant alone she had proven the pride of her high school time and again!
Well, until that bitch Macquarie had suddenly started beating her in every game. But Macquarie must have been cheating somehow. Macquarie always cheated.
"So, this loose end you were talking about a minute ago," she offered as basis for a conversation. He refused it.
"It's not exactly relevant to your end of tonight's events, and explaining it would just slow you down."
"Slow me down?"
"The next city-bound train leaves in seven minutes. You can make that, but you'll need to hurry."
Marie slung her bag over her shoulder.
"It's better for your back to wear it on both shoulders."
She took the hint but made no act of pretending to enjoy it. "Gosh! What are you, my *dad*?"
"Not really."
"It was a rhetorical question."
"It was a rhetorical negative."
There was no point arguing with that, so Marie stooped enough for him to climb on his shoulders and left the matter - and her room - at that.
"Alright, Kyub," Marie finally allowed a grin to pass across her face like the shadow of a cloud in high wind, just as she locked the front door on her way out. "Let's get going."
THINKING ALOUD
Telepathy (rarely known also as "mind-to-mind communication") is the process of the transfer of information from one mind to another. Usually, this is conducted with a willing Incubator body acting as proxy, although sapient entities with an externalised soul are capable of sharing thoughts at a slightly reduced bandwidth. In effect, if entities A and B are to communicate, the information from body A's central nervous system is retrieved by soul A's ideal system, transmitted to soul B's ideal system, and stored in body B's central nervous system. While this does allow for faster and potentially more secretive communication, many merits of non-semiotic communication (that is, communication of pure ideas rather than symbols such as words or gestures which stand in for those ideas) are vastly overlooked. For example, telepathy has allowed for perfectly fluent communication between magical girls from societies which had never met prior, as well as therapy for girls suffering from dysphasia or dyslexia.
Telepathy arose as a consequence of first contact with the Incubators some two million years ago, but the capacity for it is innate in all beings sapient enough to imagine and desire to communicate abstract concepts. Humans, however, weren't aware they had the capability to do so until the interlopers offered their own hive mind to act as a transmitter and receiver, much in the same way that a human born and raised in a blue room would be unaware of their own ability to see the colour red. Most still aren't.
The single most famous telepathic message was most likely the first message sent between disability rights activist Adelaide Sterne (1965 - 1982) and philanthropist Sylvia Carlos (1943 - 1989) on the 30th of January, 1979. Carlos transcribed it later as, "I can't hear, and I can't talk. But I don't need to do either when my mind is so much sharper than their tongues."
(A/N, taken from the Ao3 upload: Hey guys! I figured with the new year (and with PMMM's tenth anniversary in just a week, holy crap!) I ought to try something new. No idea how this is going to work or how long it's going to take but finding out should be half the fun eh? New chapter hopefully every other Sunday, I think I can manage that pace.
As of chapter 12, this fic now has a blog at puellafuriadarkmagica .tumblr .com.)