"The following email is strictly confidential. We've never met, but I'm hoping I can entrust this information to you, because as the situation stands we see no other options." - Hope Fearnley

Alice was hungry. It had been an easy six hours since she'd eaten breakfast at this point, and she had spent most of the time since making last-minute preparations for tonight. She knew rationally, of course, that there was no reason for her to feel hungry - after all, she was holding a club sandwich, and it was meant for herself, and prepared for the exact lunch she so desired. There was a very obvious solution to her problem. The only matter was that there existed a very slight disappointment, related tangentially to the matter at hand.

She and her best fri-

She and her kind-of fr-

She and this girl she worked with, Margaret, were frequent patrons of Miguel's, which fancied itself the only magical girl exclusive diner in the Bay Area. Alice knew that obviously that alone was no reason for either of them to feel owed anything. It was simply that it had become routine, deviation from routine was uncomfortable. Not to say she didn't like the new, the different...

She caught herself. There she went again, overanalyzing her every thought like she needed to communicate them to some kind of audience. None of that mattered. All that mattered was the mild inconvenience that her and Maragaret's table was occupied by three girls she didn't know.

"Hey shortstop!" one of the girls snickered. "What are you staring at?"

"You don't know I'm short. Maybe I'm just really far away," Alice retorted.

"Scram, kid," huffed another rolling her eyes and waving vaguely in her direction.

A shadow loomed over the table. The girl who cast it had been growing increasingly impatient about the hanging plot thread she had become two weeks prior.

"Excuse me, ladies," Margaret cooed, "but my friend would really like a seat right here. If the three of you would be so kind as to take your business elsewhere."

"Margaret..." Alice telepathized. "Let them have the table. It's fine. I don't actually care that much."

"This isn't about the table. This is a matter of principle. I'm setting an example, so don't interrupt me. Got it?"

The three girls around the table groaned. One elected herself a representative for the trio. "This place is basically empty. Would it kill you to sit literally anywhere else?"

Margaret leaned her open palms on the table. "I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you three are new here. In that case, let me explain how things work. My name is Margaret McManus, and when I ask people nicely for something, I get it. If someone, in turn, asks me very nicely for something in return, I give it. If someone refu-"

"Will you stop bothering us if we move?"

"I don't think you're getting the-"

"Yes," Alice cut in. "What Margaret means to say is yes."

Three girls shuffled out of their worn leather seats. Two girls shuffled in.

"What's the deal with newbies?" Margaret demanded. "No respect! Can't they tell I have a reputation?" She slumped back in her seat and sighed, then silently cursed herself for being so exhausted on such an important day.

Alice smirked. "Maybe it's because your cat ears are showing."

"Seriously?" Margaret put a hand to her scalp. She winced when her fingers brushed the tips of her ears sticking out from under her hoodie. "Dammit! No wonder I could overhear all their pointless bullshit. I just thought they were being super loud."

Alice tilted her head at the portrait on the wall by their table.

"What? Oh! Mrs. Carlos, please excuse my language!" She bowed to the portrait of a short, portly woman in her late thirties or early forties, with a radiant smile and a well-groomed mop of thick black hair. It wasn't a faux pas to curse in her presence, but Margaret always felt a little weird doing it.

"She was always Ms. Carlos, actually," the eponymous Miguel explained, gaze fixed on the portrait through his wistful approach. "Never married. And even then, she insisted everyone call her Sylvia. Or Syl, if they wanted."

He was a smallish, sharp-dressed man with a pristinely-kempt pencil mustache, a dulling cowlick, and the voice of a film star. He wore aviators indoors and at night because nobody had the heart to tell him this hadn't been cool for a few decades now.

"But even though she and Stephen were happy together, they never did end up getting married. I'm sure they had their reasons, though. Not really my place to speculate. Or anyone else's, for that matter."

Alice nodded. "I thought you and she were close enough that she'd tell you that kind of thing."

"Oh, she probably would! But I was always too intimidated to pry into her private life. She was from a branch of the family I never knew existed until she asked me to come out here. It sounds kind of funny when I say it like that, that a woman I've never met before calls me up and tells me, 'Hey! I'm your long lost cousin, magic is real, and I need you to come out to the other side of the country to help me build a halfway house for teenage girls who are literally cursed'."

Margaret forced down a half-chewed wad of sandwich-like matter and asked, "Seriously? Why you of all people, if you were so far away?"

"Well, I was working a dead-end job in Houston at the time, and I figured even if it was a scam, at least being involved with some criminal trying to swindle me out of money I didn't have would be more interesting than just going on like that. I think she knew that, somehow. I think she said once that the Incubator told some girl to tell her about me."

"Right..." Margaret nodded her vague acknowledgement, but her eyes were now glued to the portrait. The serene repose upon her features, no doubt caricaturized by her sanctified eminence, but still so strikingly lifelike. The smokestack's drawl of jet hair that caped her shoulders, the uneven reflection of gold light in her eyes, up close so obviously comprised of carefully-spread dollops of acrylic paint - and all the more impressive for it.

Alice felt the question Margaret wanted to ask, and took the initiative herself.

"What happened to her?"

Miguel sighed. "We never found out. She just disappeared one day. For a long time, I was sure she would come back, but... that was twenty years ago. January 1989. Whatever happened, I think she knew it was coming. Or that it'd come someday, just not when. A few weeks before, she started withdrawing staggeringly large amounts of cash from her bank account and putting them toward your community in one way or another. The police search for her lasted months, but nothing came of it. If Stephen knew anything, he didn't say it. Still, it was obvious from the way he was at the time that he knew she was gone for good."

"And what happened to him?"

"Damn, last time we talked must have been... a few days after the police stopped looking for her. He told me that he couldn't stand to stick around in a place where everything reminded him of her, and just... left, without another word of it. We never talked again after that."

Margaret noted that Miguel was a terrible liar. Still, though, she knew better than to say anything about that at a time like this.

"So, yeah. He moved over to New York to live with his sister and his nephews. Then I got an email in 2002. Apparently he'd taken up smoking over there, and eventually cancer got him."

"Shit, man. I'm so sorry." Margaret cursed herself for the bluntness of her sympathy, but it was all she really had to offer.

A hollow laugh. "What can I tell you? I came here looking for an interesting life, and I sure as hell got it." He laughed again and shook his head at the portrait. "But... I guess that's enough of an old man's ramblings for today, huh? You guys look like you're in a hurry to get through those sandwiches."

"We've got a job tonight," Margaret explained. "Pretty big one, too. Probably our biggest one yet."

"Oh! I see! Well, then! I'll definitely leave you to it! Good luck with...?"

"It's confidential."

"Oh, of course! Well, that's a little troubling."

"Don't worry about it. Me and Alice are already getting paid to be just that."

The duo stepped out of their van and into whatever bitter January wind the Brooklyn Basin spat at them.

"Quick detour," Margaret shrugged, and flung the keys wildly at her accomplice, who flinched to catch the keys inches from taking her eye out. Shit was like Grease, Alice thought, with her eye embodying Sandy's soft-spoken, exotic beauty, and the key taking the role of the local bad boy and total charmer Danny Zuko. That's how out her eye would have been taken.

"Oakland isn't exactly my idea of quick."

"It's quick in the grand scheme of things. We'll still be there on time, just not with as much time to bumble around town like a pair of useless morons for a few hours. And it'll be worth it, trust me. It'll save us so much trouble later."

"A forty-minute round trip to buy weapons from a girl who won't talk to you is the *more* efficient way to do this?"

"Christ, Alice! Come on, a little perspective never hurt anyone!"

Margaret was unaware of the irony that came with that name drop alongside such a claim. Just short of two millennia prior, a Jewish carpenter living along the river Jordan grew upset at the realization that living under Roman rule was generally making people very apathetic and miserable, and decided to spend the next few years walking around with his friends and telling people how important he thought it was that they look for ways to stop being apathetic and miserable. This grew to the point where the Romans had him killed, and his opinions spent the next few thousand years being parroted by generations of rich and powerful Christian men whose wealth and power generally made people very apathetic and miserable. It could be said that a little perspective had hurt him very much indeed.

By pure metaeclyptic coincidence, this man had lived in a country which, some two millennia later, possessed the area code "+972": a perfect multiple of 108. In many ancient Indian traditions, this number in turn is the number of intersecting points between the human consciousness and the physical body. The reason this is coincidental is because when she talked to Margaret, Alice found herself stressed in all of them.

The moment Holly noticed who had stepped through her front door, her blade was already at the would-be patron's throat.

"Margaret."

"Holly."

Silence.

Holly lifted the blade a quarter-inch, until Margaret had to tilt her head back to avoid having her larynx's molecules resonate at just the right frequency to slop out of her neck.

"I'm not selling to you."

"Hey. Heyyy. Don't be like that, babe. Come on, I'll pay double."

"You don't have double," Alice prompted telepathically.

"Yeah, I know. I'll just borrow from you."

"You still haven't paid back the last two times you've said that."

"I'm a long-term borrower, alright? Sheesh!"

Holly shifted the sword's balance in her grip. "I have principles, okay? Not selling to thieves is a big one."

"Hey, that's great! I have principles too! I'll go back on mine if you go back on yours."

"I don't think you get what a principle is."

"No, it's cool! Seriously, if you sell to me you can have breakfast with me and Alice at Miguel's tomorrow! We've got our own seats there. We don't let anyone else sit there. Not under any circumstances. Unless...?"

"I don't want breakfast there, and I don't want breakfast with you two."

"You don't wanna watch the inauguration with us tomorrow?"

"Why would I wanna do that? So I can watch another useless old man talk about the kind of things people would like him to do for the next four years?"

Margaret forced a grin, which was a surprisingly calculated maneuver with the point of the sword almost close enough to brush the hairs on her neck. "Oh, come on! Don't be like that! It's gonna be different this time! Can't you feel it?"

"No. As a matter of fact, I can't."

"I mean, sure. Maybe he's another old head of a nuclear family appointed by an undeniably prejudiced institution. But at least he's not white this time!"

"So what, Margie? The senate is! The hou- oh my God, you're making me correct everything so that I'm still talking to you. Man, screw you guys."

"So... is that a maybe on breakfast tomorrow?"

The sharp of the blade touched her skin just lightly enough to be felt.

"Okay, okay! Forget having breakfast there, and forget having it with us. But the rest of it?"

"I sell you things and then I, what, have breakfast tomorrow? Period?"

"See, now that you've put it like that..."

Holly put her blade away. "Let me ask you two a question. What do I do for a living?"

"Sell weapons?" Alice offered.

"Exactly! Awesome! Good, you get it. What kind of weapons?"

Margaret sighed. "See, that's more than one qu-"

"Enchanted weapons?"

"Nice! You're two for two. You know what enchanted weapons do?"

"Magic...?" Alice tried.

"They kill witches, mouth breather. Yeah, bet you're taking in deep breaths of fresh air or whatever the weather's like down there."

Alice threw her hands in the air and made the conscious decision to sulk. The other two were too ensnared in tensions of their own design to parse the presence of the miasma of sulkage, but it was there nonetheless.

"What's your point?" Margaret asked.

"What I'm doing is giving people the technology to save lives at an affordable price. What you're doing is going around and stealing shit, and in fact, the threat you're posing to people's security is making people less inclined to buy shit they find on these shelves. We're not on the same moral ground here, you get it?"

"Come on, Margaret, let's go," Alice mumbled. She moved to leave, and Margaret followed suit.

"Yeah, and don't come back," Holly huffed.

"Did you see that?" Margaret pouted as she swung her weight back into the driver's seat. "What's gotten her in that mood all of a sudden?"

"It's us."

"Huh?"

"We're really terrible customers."

"Oh. Yeah, I guess so."

When Margaret started the engine, Alice continued, "You were a good distraction, though. I managed to swipe a flashlight where the light is only visible to whoever's touching it."

"Woah, really? Sweet."

"Oh! This isn't related, but you got an email this morning from a girl in Australia. Someone really important just got killed over in Sydney, and they can't figure out how anyone could have gotten in or out without being seen."

"Ah! It seems I do have a reputation after all, then! How about that?" She looked to Alice and demonstrated a well-practiced gloating face.

"Eyes on the road, please."

"Right. Sorry. I don't know, I always wanted to be a big name of some kind. I'd like to be really controversial, too. The kind of person nobody can agree upon, whose mere mention starts arguments."

"Do you mean like Barbara Streisand, or do you mean like Che Guevara?"

"What?" Margaret pulled onto the Nimitz Freeway and pretended not to see the man she had overtaken flip her off. "I don't know who those people are. I don't get the references you young people make nowadays. Are they YouTubers or whatever you call them?"

"No they- you know what? Sure, why not."

"Ha! Knew it."

ENCHANTMENT

Enchantment is the process of imbuing a physical object with magic, either so that the object can interact with dark magic (such as a weapon gaining the ability to do harm to the body of a witch) or so that the magic can be granted physicality. The latter is particularly useful in that it allows the provision of a magical girl's power to whoever happens to be in possession of the object.

From a philosophical standpoint, this raises several questions in what transhumanists refer to as an "epic win". Whereas objects such as prosthetics, clothes, and vehicles allow for extensions to the physical self outside of the body, and systems like writing and communication, to take notes and to ask for information, all allow for extensions to one's own knowledge outside of the mind, does enchantment present the same transcendence of hard limits to one's own soul? There are tools and weapons around the world which have maintained enchantment for eons. Have their creators achieved the same sort of immortality as kings and queens of yore, whose names and deeds go remembered to this day? It's at this point, when the phrase "of yore" is tossed around without a hint of irony, that all the other ontologists decide to stop inviting them to parties.

Not all enchantments are equal in strength, however: as it happens, longevity is generally inversely proportional to power, leading to a broad classification into two roughly defined types. Some are maintained over a long period of time to simplify basic tasks (such as Alice's pilfered flashlight), whereas others are made for dramatic reversals of circumstance in the space of a few seconds. That said, a magical girl with a particularly strong will can usually manage the upsides of both types, or sometimes even create self-sustaining enchantments - those which can endure until their respective object breaks.

Even more durable still is the body of a magical girl, which is permanently enchanted to allow for the input of consciousness from an externally contained soul, and the output of sensory information in return. What sets it apart from a self-sustaining enchantment is that even if the body is almost completely destroyed, it can regenerate the enchantment and reconnect to its controller.

The longest-surviving enchantment in history is the Mehrgarh Crown, a small ceramic headband capable of granting its wearer a low-grade telekinesis. It's presumed that the object was created some eight thousand years ago, when it would have been far more powerful. The shortest was a staff given the power to channel lightning, created somewhere in Mexico circa 500 BCE. It was immediately struck by lightning and destroyed.