"My whole life, I've felt like there's someone very far away, calling for help, and that I'm the only person in the world who can hear them." - Sylvia Carlos
Marie looked up and down the street before so much as approaching Madeleine's front door. She didn't know why - was it the thing people did in the movies? Wait, why would she care if it was?
Madeleine's house was nothing out of the ordinary for its neighbourhood: mid-sized, two storey (or side-split if she were to be more specific), clearly a faux-modernist design, judging from the flat, angular mimicry of brutalist schools of design, but she didn't recognise the architect. The overt emphasis on arched windows and shallow roof pitches suggested whoever it was must have had a lovely time living in Spain, though.
It was a perfectly unassuming house, but something about Madeleine seemed to exude gravitas. Macquarie had told her the two would get on fine. That meant Marie was finally going to meet a magical girl who was a normal damn person! Wasn't that cause enough to savour the moment?
She rapped firmly but tactfully on the door. It was a knock which said, "good day," and, "fine, thank you for asking," and "lovely weather we're having this evening, isn't it?" which was somewhat inappropriate given that it was a) mid-morning and b) nearly forty fucking degrees (around the low-mid thirties, the expletive becomes an integral part of the heat itself - thirty-three degrees is fine. Thirty-three fucking degrees is not), but the sentiment still came through clearly regardless.
"Just a second!" someone called from beyond the door.
A moment later, a sock-on-carpet corridor approach. Marie weighed up her expectations, few and primitive though they tended in the fragile few seconds before the answer of a door. Fewer still survived the greeting she received.
The girl standing before Marie bore a superficial resemblance to her - Madeleine was markedly taller and a fair way leaner, her eyes were a bespectacled and homochromatic silver - but even then, the platinum of her hair, the angle at which she smiled... enough existed that might have, in another life, implied consanguinity to some degree or other.
"You must be Crawford, right? Come on in. Kyubey told me you'd be around today."
Marie took up the invitation. "Yeah, um," she began, but for the fraction of a second she spent on the threshold, something misfired through her brain. It felt like a pang of remorse, borne of a cry for help reverberating off the back of her subconscious. From who? Madeleine? But she looked so... bright, so collected.
She blinked, and made nothing of it. Just because she wasn't gay didn't mean she was the world's biggest fan of mixed messages.
"Please, call me Marie."
The world's biggest fan of mixed messages is a Vancouverite bartender by the name of Kel Moore. Kel, better known as Kelly to her friends (his friends? Or- wait, no, Kelly was the name they didn't like, right?) is infamous for collecting signs in pairs that utterly conflict with one another, and displaying them throughout their pub. Which gendered bathroom is which amounts to a coin toss, and every item on the menu requires patrons to ask for clarifications on its price. The establishment is named "Pubside Down," which is neither funny nor displayed anywhere on or in the building.
The world's second biggest fan of mixed messages is Slavoj Žižek.
"Oh! Call me Maddie, in that case. Nobody calls me Whitman unless it's for business. I thought you'd be into a last-name basis kind of thing, because Mac- because Lara does that all the time."
Marie shook her head. "Jesus. I promise you, I am nothing like Lara."
Madeleine visibly relaxed. "Would it be unprofessional for me to say I'm glad to hear that?"
"Hey, I won't tell anyone."
They laughed the matter off while Madeleine ushered Marie into a stark white open-plan kitchen. Spread across a table in the next room over were an assortment of scrapbooks, novellas, pencil cases, and binders.
"Ignore the mess, by the way! I'm moving out at the end of this year, so we're getting rid of all my old school stuff."
Marie picked up a book at random. Harlan Ellison's The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.
"I've never read any Ellison. Is he good?"
"I never read it, to tell you the truth. The first scene was about a man named William Sterog committing multiple mass murders. Just thinking about death makes me violently upset. You can have it, if you want."
"Oh, cheers."
"Can I get you anything to eat? Drink? I'm taking a shot at baking bread myself, but I'd advise I'm not great at it."
"Just a water, thanks."
"No problem. Chilled water or tap water?"
Marie helped herself to a chair on the outer side of the kitchen bench. "Chilled, if you wouldn't mind."
"Not at all!" Madeleine, deft and graceful, procured a glass from a drawer between them, tossed it from one hand to the other, and pressed it against an indentation on the door of her fridge. An electric whir promised and promptly delivered a glassful of chilled water. Madeleine delivered. "My parents are out, by the way. My extended family usually meets up for Australia Day, see. I told them I had a work thing, which, if the Incubator's to be taken at his word, is exactly what this is."
Marie blinked back a mouthful of water. "Oh snap. I'm not keeping you from anything, am I?"
"Someone's been murdered, Marie," Madeleine asserted, suddenly grim. "Important, too, and a close friend. Don't you think that takes precedence over everything else?"
"I- well, that's a really good point. Of course it does. Are you up to speed on everything?"
"How up to speed is up to speed? The last I've heard is that we were looking into Marlowe, and that there was some kind of controversy around you taking Deckard's place."
"I'm adamantly against it," Marie shrugged. "The less responsibility I'm forced to take in your bizarro magical world, the better."
"Smart. The last thing you want to do is blow your wish on something dumb."
"That sounds like it's coming from a place of experience."
Madeleine shrugged. "I wanted to get back at my ex, for a while. I mean, he wasn't a bad guy by himself. It takes two to tango, and so forth."
"I guess that's fair."
"Then the Incubator started showing up. I didn't get the gravity of what he was offering, so..."
"Don't worry. I've heard this story way too many times before. I get it."
"Of course. You've been in on our secret little world for longer than most of the rest of us. That's probably why Deckard wanted to entrust so much to you."
"Yeah, well... I've got my own kind of thing going on. I can't exactly be devoting so much of my time to fighting witches and dying young and tragically. I've got uni to go to next year. I've got a company to inherit whenever my dad retires."
Madeleine laughed. "Oh, believe me. You do not want to juggle study and magic."
"Ha! Is that so?"
"I'm training to become a police officer. I thought, hey, this should be easier than trying for a degree, now that I'm both physically stronger and in need of a lot more time to look after myself. I like to imagine I made the right choice, but it's still not the easiest thing in the world."
"Damn!" Marie grinned. "You're a cop? That's pretty cool."
"Not yet. I only started training in the second half of last year."
"Still, though. I imagine it must be pretty easy to reconcile your duties as both a human and a magical girl that way."
Madeleine looked for all the world as if she was going to say something guided by the spur of the moment, and for the half-second she opened her mouth to speak, Marie heard once more that beacon of panic resonating with the deepest recesses of her mind. Then Madeleine adjusted her composure and simply concluded: "Yeah. I suppose it is. Sorry, I must be wasting your time right now, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean here I am, going on and on about myself, when you're here on some kind of business. What was it you came here wanting to know?"
Marie was taken aback. That was unabashedly direct, no wonder she and Macquarie didn't get along. "Oh, uh... well, I'm looking into the death of Phoebe Deckard, and I was wondering if you had any information you thought might be useful to solving it."
"I see..." Madeleine's face hardened. "Why you specifically? Nobody else has come to me for any information, and with good reason. Like I said, I abhor death. If I knew anything about who might have done this, I'd be doing everything I could to see to it that they get what's coming to them."
"Right. Sure, I just-"
"You don't 'just' anything, Marie. Don't you get it? Have you ever read a novel where the author tries to conceive of a fate worse than death?"
"Well, yeah. I-"
"It's BULLSHIT!" Madeleine snapped. No, actually - Marie was starting to call her Whitman in her head now. "Anyone who says that underestimates how terrifying death really is. All you are is a certain configuration of cells and tissue, Marie, and when you die, the universe just forgets that configuration. It stops caring about the fact that you lived and loved and accomplished anything, that there were battles you won and lost, and times you laughed, and times you cried. All you are to the cosmos is a shape. And when your life ends, the universe stops caring that the shape ever existed. Death is a grand cosmic dismissal, a declaration that the chaotic whims of reality think you're so insignificant - that you have always BEEN so insignificant - that there's no reason you should be permitted to exist any longer!"
In dramatic conclusion, Madeleine punctuated a fist to the bench. She hadn't even immediately noticed that she'd brought her fist down on Marie's glass, shattering it every which way.
"Holy shit." Marie grimaced. "Are you okay? Should I get a bandage?"
Whitman loosened up, only ever so slightly. She lifted her fist. Not a scratch marred its flesh. "Don't worry about it. It takes a lot more than that to hurt the viceroy to Sydney's Marquess."
"You mean Visceroy."
"Ha! Macquarie wishes I meant visceroy."
"Seriously, are you not hurt at all?"
"I feel like we're dodging the point I'm making about how existentially mortifying death is here!"
Marie backed off. "Right, right. I get it. You've made your point. Do you think it's even scarier than, say, Silencing?"
"I don't know what that is."
"Oh. I was hoping you would tell me."
The two girls silently sized one another up for a solid eight seconds, then another liquid three.
"Seriously, though. What kind of power makes you immune to getting cut while smashing through glass?"
"Oh, this?" Whitman mused idly, dustpanning and brushing the glass with her bare hands. "Adaptation. If some hazard or weapon would harm me, that kind of danger won't hurt me a second time. You would not believe the number of girls who've tried to fight me with swords or axes or anything so stock-standard, only to find out someone's beaten them to it."
Marie scoffed. "What, and that relates to you wanting to get back at your ex somehow?"
"Oh, this isn't my main power, I just got an ability that helped me keep fighting for longer because I was stubborn. Because I couldn't just let our relationship slide. Although I don't like the idea of calling one power the main one and the other secondary to it. I mean, this is a lot more useful than... well, I kind of don't like to talk about it."
Marie nodded. Did looking agreeable ease the tension here? Was she looking agreeable? She'd heard her dad talk about it a lot, and thought it was a crock of horseshit. She wasn't ready to rule out the utility of a crock of horseshit when she was in the house of an angry woman who could break glass with her fist. "Why do they call it the main one, then?"
"It was the first one, I think. Our primitive ancestors, early magical girls, Puella magi, whatever you want to call them, all they had was whatever power they wished for. The 'secondary' magic, whatever emotion had compelled them to make that wish in the first place? That seemed to be reserved for whatever witches crawled out of their souls when they died."
Marie kept nodding, and then she didn't. "Wait. But witches are the fully grown forms of magical girls, right?"
"Oh, so you're one of those crackpots who thinks every witch ever just suddenly miraculously undergoes a total change of personality and starts eating people for the hell of it?"
"Hang on, what do you- no, forget it. You believe what you want. But supposing they're parts of the same life cycle, isn't the fact of modern magical girl having primitive witch powers just recapitulation theory? As in, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?"
"So what if it was?"
"I thought that theory was debunked like forever ago."
"I thought magic was, too."
"Fair enough," Marie mumbled, and that was that.
It was as Madeleine - maybe she could be Madeleine again - had turned to bin the scraps of glass that Marie yet again felt that faint cry for help.
"Is everything alright?" Marie tried, in a suddenly hushed tone.
"Hm?" Madeleine turned to face her, genuinely straining to figure Marie out.
"If you can't tell me, uh..." Marie tried, this time over a telepathic channel, "blink twice. I'll figure something out for you."
"What are you talking about?" Madeleine asked, still aloud.
"Oh! False alarm, then. I don't know. I feel like I heard some kind of telepathic cry for help."
Too many things passed over Madeleine's face for Marie to keep track. Surprise, concern, confusion, dread, and then... nothing.
"I wonder what that would have been. It wasn't me."
"Do you-"
A brief, disorienting silence.
"Do I what?"
"Oh! Nothing, I dunno."
"Riiight..." Madeleine shifted her weight uneasily. "Could you hold that thought for one second, Marie? I need to go check on something. I'm downloading some stuff my teacher's sent through to me. I've been upstairs and downstairs all morning, checking up on it. He wants me to let him know as soon as I get it up and running."
"Yeah, no problem!" Marie shrugged her hostess's dismissal, who made good time of the affair of leaving the room.
Marie thought over what Madeleine had just said. 'He wants me to let him know as soon as I get it up and running.' It sounded too fake to be a lie, unless it was put together in a panic. What was she actually excusing herself for? Marie considered for a moment that her main power was in fact so shameful that Madeleine couldn't even bear to tell her (a notorious witch battle observer, after all) that she was going to save someone else's life.
It was a nice thought, certainly. But it didn't sit right with her at all. There was the more terrifying possibility that she herself was an intended recipient of the cry for help. That it was focused directly at her, not broadcast out into the environment - otherwise Madeleine would have heard it, certainly.
But it wasn't a voice she recognised! Why was someone she didn't know singling her out for help?
Then Marie felt overcome by a nauseating kind of logic. Someone was calling to her, and not Madeleine. If they didn't want Marie's help, specifically...
As quietly as she could, she began out into the next room, all at once feeling much like a pilotfish forced out from the shade of a shark's fin (she tried to construct a pun on the bases of "hospitality" and "nurse shark", and failed) and into the wild open blue, easy pickings for those the food chain dubs more fortunate than herself.
She scanned the mantelpiece. Half a dozen framed photos of Madeleine, sometimes by parents, sometimes in Venturer Scout uniform, almost always with trophies. She was an upstanding citizen. She was to be an officer of the law. Marie admitted, in fact, that in her whole time living this secret life she was the most normal person she had ever met. And yet, so much as carrying onward to the staircase ahead of her gave her pause. She hung around for a matter of seconds before realising that either she was slipping into paranoia with so little warning, or she was in the house of a genuine threat to someone's safety, and as long as she stood here and left her suspicions neither confirmed nor denied, she was paralysed by the dread of both at the same time.
Nothing for it, then, she thought to herself, and took the first funeral-procession-determined stride upward. It can't be helped.
Marie hesitated partway up the stairs. Not because she heard the voice again, no, but because of the deafening thud of her heart. It reminded her of a hip-hop beat she may have heard somewhere. Years ago, maybe. Why?
It's a little odd, she thought, again with no clear reason beyond the epinephrine-addling of her own mind, that when people talk about someone's capacity to devise plans and keep them to themself, the ability to scheme in silence, they talk about 'what's going on upstairs'. Strange too that the word stair sounds so much like stare. Like the feeling that she's being watched, that something is expected of her. The idea of living up to expectation. Coming of age. Rite of passage, maybe, maybe... maybe even the liminality of personhood in trying to grow to meet those expectations. And what is a stairwell if not the most liminal space ever devised? A space that never exists for a reason beyond getting someone to either side of itself?
She thought of long car trips, the anxiety of preparing for them when she was a child, when she was too small to see out of the windows and watch the contour of the roads herself, and thereby prone to terrible carsickness. That same anxiety she felt now. Were roads all one long liminal space? Did liminal spaces make her so uneasy because their only goal is to take her from one place to another, and never to make her think or feel or experience anything beyond that?
The word sensation came to mind. The literal definition of aesthetic, in fact, and what was aesthetic if not a stylistic intention to evoke a sensation? Its antonym was anaesthetic - lack of sensation. Come to think of it, weren't cars progressively being tuned with better and better technology to keep out the elements?
She thought about the hip-hop beat again. Interesting that one of the most aggressively political genres of music was largely mastered to sound optimal on car stereo systems. Were people so discontent with the very numbing they were subjecting themselves to?
She knew some magical girls enjoyed how adjustable their pain sensitivity was. Was this like that?
What Marie didn't know, as she reached the top of the stairs, was that hip-hop was invented in New York City, 1973, by Clive "DJ Kool Herc" Campbell, who would use the instrumental breaks on two separate copies of the same funk record played back to back repeatedly to give the impression that they were being looped. This also happened to be the exact city and year in which Thomas Pynchon had written Gravity's Rainbow. If Marie could fathom the connection between these two events, her mind, constrained by the limitations of her physical neurology, would tear itself apart.
She heard Madeleine's voice behind one of the doors on the upper floor. She sounded like she was berating someone. Saying things like "...ed to understand what I'm doing is bigger th..." and "...atch you calling for help again I'll g...".
It is a common misconception that a person's intelligence refers exclusively to a single attribute of that person, and in many cases is even mistaken for knowledge. There are, however, many different kinds of intelligence, and intelligence does not necessarily require very much knowledge - rather, how knowledge can be applied to solving different kinds of problems. Types of intelligence Marie might use in everyday life include logical intelligence, emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and linguistic intelligence (being a mere mortal, of course, her demonic intelligence is undeveloped).
Emotional intelligence involves concepts like the ability to process and respond to situations where the need to express sympathy arises. When Marie put her hand on the doorknob, it could be said that she was outstandingly emotionally intelligent.
When she turned it, however, the most generous of hypothetical onlookers would have no choice but to rescind their hypothetical compliments: more apparent to Marie's demeanour was a deficit of common sense.
Standing in the corner of what Marie had to assume was Whitman's bedroom was the young woman herself, now adorned in silver pauldrons and a snow-white cape, shining gauntlet on her right fist, lifting another figure into the air.
When Marie noticed the latter was held aloft, she had to confront the reality that they were a lot shorter than they appeared at first glance. Even then, it took her a second to recognise that this person Whitman was holding was a child - a girl of only about thirteen or fourteen, blindfolded, gagged, and what horrified Marie most of all, being lifted out of a small metal box that looked no more than 150 centimetres long, and half that tall and wide.
Whitman noticed Marie. Nervously, she let the girl back down.
"I know what this looks like," she admitted, "but I assure you, there is a very logical explanation for this."
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGICAL GIRLS, PART 1
Inhabitants of Earth tend to define magical girls as "young girls who possess magical abilities, which they typically use through an ideal alter ego into which they can transform." For all practical purposes which might beset them and their small-minded, Terran issues, this is about as complete a definition they might need until they have the capacity and/or assistance required to leave the orbit of their star.
The Concordance, however, defines magical girls in what essentially translates to "Terran sapients whose souls have been augmented by Concordance technology for the purposes of using category four psychohazards as a means to generate emotional energy" (category four, for the record, is "psychological states which impair or prevent the ability to make rational decisions, but do not interrupt baseline biological functions"). This definition is much broader and much more truthful, as it includes specimens which outlive their youth, and specimens which develop a transhuman detachment from their understanding of gender.
The Concordance's first experiments on Terrans began two million years ago, and involved determining which of its inhabitants fit the following criteria best.
1). Subjects must be capable of feeling and communicating both simple and complex emotions.
2). Subjects must be able to quickly learn and teach abstract concepts from and to other subjects, and from and to the experiment's supervisor.
3). Subjects must demonstrate a resilience to endure augmentation which causes them to generate astronomically large quantities of energy without dying in the process.
The best fit proved to be adolescent female specimens of Homo habilis, who responded most positively to supervision by a Concordance representative resembling a small, white, carnivorous mammal.
Due to a concurrent sudden increase in the universe's dark energy content, the model of magical enhancement necessitated progressively more and more resources until around 900 000 years ago, when the spiritual physiology of its users became so distinct from their predecessors that they had to be considered a separate species. Due to not only the increase in human intelligence over time, but the diversification of human modes of intelligence, adaptations modern magical girls have developed over their predecessors do not make them better suited to their physical environments, but their social and emotional surroundings. Most scholars of the subject generally agree that magical girls are diversifying to better suit these environments by a gradual shift into roughly fifteen subspecies.
(Hey guys! Sorry for the wait in the last two weeks. Exams have been holding me back from really working on any of this. Thankfully, this is a primo spot to have a two-parter, so expect the second part around this weekend or so. In case anything like this happens again, I've set up an official blog at puellafuriadarkmagica . tumblr . com where I'll post each new update and any important news about delays and the like.)