"There is a word for enforcing your law upon someone who has not agreed to be your subject. In the first half of the forties, we saw how that word was pronounced." - Liliane Petiere
Another week went by.
Kyubey was on the ropes now, nagging and pleading for Marie's soul at times more inappropriate than he had before. It was difficult to dismiss him while eating dinner with her family, annoying while on the phone to a telemarketer, and disappointing when he got up from sleeping comfortably curled up on top of her to pester her at the crack of dawn.
Marie was One Of The Girls now, although she remained on the fence as to whether she actually wanted to be. Twice more in that time, she joined Hope and Audrey at the gym. Could she say she trusted Hope now? She didn't know. She didn't know if she'd ever know. But it was as easy a matter as anything else to push aside whenever she felt like it. She hadn't shown the gun to anyone, either. Her optimistic side told her to wait until she was sure something was amiss, while the cynic in her believed keeping it under wraps could eternalise this peaceful Now. She'd read Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto too, and although it was clearly some kind of radical hippie crap or other, she was already pretending to feel safe around Hope. Respecting her culture on top of that was effortless.
But there was a creeping irritation arising in her, that the discomfort distrust effected was built on the paradox of both her reliance on others and the necessity of keeping them away. If she could prove she could take care of herself, all would resolve. She had given herself the objective of slaying a witch all her own. If she could, she would simultaneously prove her independence, and that she would never need to become a magical girl. Reluctantly, but certainly, Kyubey agreed with this logic.
The difficulty laid in finding one. Any old soul gem could track one's presence and open its labyrinth effortlessly, but for her, the ordeal was much more complicated. Well, she was sure that it would be if she knew how to do it.
It was on one such aimless - if she would pardon the expression - witch hunt, that a girl Marie had never seen before pulled up to her on motorcycle and removed her helmet.
"Hey! Marie!" she whispered. "You're being followed. Get on, I'll give you a lift out of here."
"I'm sorry, who are you? What's going on?"
Something shifted place in Marie's mind. She blinked. "Dani? Why didn't I recognise you?"
"Long story. Get on and I'll explain. You're really going to want to get on. Now."
Marie looked up and down the street, but saw nothing. Still, though, despite her hesitance to trust anyone she knew, she felt like she could make an exception for Danika - she seemed simple, not the type to want for anything, or to pursue ulterior motives. She climbed aboard the motorcycle, and wrapped her arms around Danika's waist. Danika returned the helmet to her head, halfarsed some apology about not having a second on such short notice, and that this way she could keep her long black hair out of Marie's eyes. Marie was too confused to care.
They took off at once, the engine's intensifying battlecry channeling them forth clear through a moment without sense of weight or light or sound, only pure, raw velocity. The world was reduced (or expanded?) to a blur, and Danika had the power to shape it as she saw fit. This was a new Sydney to Marie, as if she was a cell of the ichor its heart circulated, and now she could watch the blood vessels from within. They were the spearhead of a bolt of lightning, burning through the sky at impossible speed, the alignments of patterns Marie couldn't see sending their path cascading down street after street.
Sydney was more dynamic than she'd ever known at this speed, taking in so much more of it in short periods of time than she ever had before. She registered forms, as they passed, of backstreet markets and open parks and metro entrances and fathomed in all its impossible gravitas, for the narrowest fraction of a second, that every person in all of these places was living a life perhaps entirely without direct entanglement to any other, all in perfect simultaneity. For that single instant, she rekindled the flame which illuminated the back of her mind when she was but of four years upon this Earth. The flame grew, and the shadows on the wall before her became clearer. And all at once, when she focused on it too hard, it was gone.
Her rumination concluded, she leaned over Danika's shoulder. "How come I couldn't recognise you?" she forced over the roar of the engine.
"That's my power! Reverse shapeshifting!"
"Reverse?!"
"That's what I said!"
"What the hell does 'reverse' mean?"
"In the opposite direction!"
"No, of course I know what reverse means! What does it mean in this particular context?"
"Hang on," Danika groaned, "I think we should carry this conversation on telepathically! It's faster, and easier to hear."
"Uh, sure," Marie thought.
"So, if I could shapeshift, I would be changing my appearance to match the way you perceive something in your mind. Instead, what I'm doing is changing the way something looks in your mind to look like me! Right now I'm making people's memories of my sister Lauren resemble yours truly. Gotta trick her parents into thinking she's still alive, see. But I guess I forgot to turn it off, and since you don't know her, I would have looked like a stranger to you."
"That sounds like shapeshifting with extra steps."
"Ahaha! You know, Phoebe and Hope said pretty much the same thing!"
"What kind of wish did you make to get a power like that?"
"It's complicated. Well, it's pretty simple to me, but everyone else finds it confusing. See, the thing you've gotta know about me is I'm not real. I'm totally made up."
"Alright," Marie nodded. "Hang on, what?"
"Well, no. Obviously I'm real. Can you imagine if I wasn't real? That'd be ridiculous."
"Right."
"Actually, I'm Lauren's imaginary friend, brought into corporeality by magic."
"What? Did she just wish a whole other person into being?"
"No, I did that part. Kyub told her to imagine a girl willing to make a wish to leave her imagination. Then they pulled me out of the ideal plane, turned me into her mental image of me, and dropped me in the physical world. To kill that girl who killed Lauren later that week, in fact."
"Huh? So you can just wish yourself into existence?"
"It was an experiment to see if they could make magical girls out of nothing and leave humankind alone. Apparently it's too energy-inefficient to try again, though."
"That's a shame."
"Yeah. I mean, it would be nice if other people knew what I was going through, but whatever."
Marie couldn't think of anything appropriately sympathetic to say to that. She waited until she felt enough time had passed to drop it.
"So where did you learn to ride?"
"Didn't! I'm figuring this out as we go along."
Marie screamed.
"Don't worry! Getting a lift with me is completely safe!" Danika grinned, then continued, slightly quieter, "-er than the alternative."
"What the hell is the alternative?!"
"Me, bit~ch!" called a telepathic voice from some way back.
Marie turned her head to see... well, nothing. Nothing to the left, either, nor the right. Then she focused. There was something there, at the edge of her mind, making an awful amount of noise. She hadn't noticed it before, because it was so unpleasant that when it had knocked on the door and asked her subconscious if it had time to sign its petition to have its sensory stimulus processed, oh don't worry, signing it will only take a moment, and oh, could we also get your email and phone number while we're at it, Marie's subconscious slammed the door shut so forcefully that a very particular agnosia had formed in her mind.
She pushed through the noise and caught sight of Lara, bounding from the road, to the second storey of an office building's edifice, then clean over an underpass, then constructing at once a line of sawblades, midair and totally inert, on whose flats she landed safely, righted herself, kept running to its end, and bounded off, still hot on Danika's tail. Another saw manifested in her right hand.
Marie clung tighter to Danika. "How long has she been following me?!"
"Oh! Longer than I have, probably. She has this black lightning thing going on, which is the power of... some goddess, I can't remember them all. Something about blotting things out of human minds and making them more prone to suggestion. I think someone used that same power to hide the death of the Prime Minister? I don't know. I wasn't paying attention."
The sawblade flew right at them, followed in quick succession by two more. The first went wide, ricocheted dumbly off the road, and clattered to a halt flat on the curb before Lara unsummoned it. Its trajectory forced Danika to swerve right. The second to the rear, prompting a brief fit of acceleration. The third flew straight for Marie's back. She yelled at Danika to swerve again, and her plea was answered with just enough time to feel the blade rush by her ear and bounce off where her spine would have been in a far less fortunate timeline.
"What do you want?!" Marie thought to Lara.
"You pulled a knife on a commanding officer," Lara sneered. "Did you think that was gonna go unpunished? By Attendant law, I'm required to kill you."
"She threatened me!"
"Did she? Or did you just assume that she was a threat to you for no reason?"
Marie didn't give her the satisfaction of a response. Danika made a sharp turn left onto a pedestrian back alley. Lara missed the turn and scrabbled back to keep pace. Danika turned right at the end, back onto the road. Lara needed a moment to correct herself and return to their tails. By the time she found it, the motorcycle curved southbound onto the Warringah Freeway.
"Are you sure we're safe out in the open?" Marie panicked.
"Bear with me here. I have an idea." Beneath her helmet, Danika grinned.
"Do I come out of it alive?"
"Don't even joke about that! I'm not gonna lose you!"
Three more saws skipped across the road behind them.
"Brilliant!" Marie grinned. "Changing our speed this much when we got onto the Freeway means she has to adjust her own to match, or else her attacks will either go long or fall short!"
"Oh, sweet! I did a clever thing?"
"Hell yeah!"
Lara was fast. Faster than any human. But she was not 110-kilometres-an-hour fast. She took to the roof of a passing car, then to another, and then another. Their velocities almost matched Marie's so it was nearly as if the bike was stationary. She broke ahead, up and onto the car in front of them. This way, Marie estimated, she could block some of the air resistance against the saws with her body, and throw them the tiniest bit more accurately. Hang on, did that make sense? It was like the wind was blowing backward, and...
No, that wasn't right. It was like she was trying to show Marie something.
"Look at you, Crawford. So presumptuous. You think just because someone was hiding the torture of a child from you, that they'd be willing to shut you up by force if you ever found out."
"Does that... does that not seem reasonable?"
"No! Idiot! She literally told you she wasn't going to kill you!"
"Well, I found it really hard to believe."
"Who would lie about that?!"
She cast another circular saw Marie's way. Danika pulled away the moment it left her hand, leaving just another too-close rush of air by their heads, a bounce against the white line marking the road boundary, and a float back into nonexistence in the blade's wake. Danika faked a deceleration, compelling Lara a few cars back, and then regaining that speed, cutting ahead of Lara's pursuit and into...
"Is this...?" Marie looked around.
"Sydney Harbour Tunnel! She's not exactly going to have the room to jump around the place in here!"
Danika's idea was only just functional, but Marie was at a point in time where there was little she enjoyed more in life than a plan with a good function to it. Lara rode in after them on top of a truck, too close to the ceiling to stand up completely. She threw two blades at diagonal angles, each bouncing off the walls of the tunnel, narrowly passing by the front of the bike from opposite angles, then each embedding in the opposite wall to its ricochet.
"Okay," Danika admitted, "I could have thought this out better. I don't know how to swerve both ways at the same time."
"Yeah, you can't exactly double-slit-experiment yourselves," Lara quipped. "You're too... macroscopic. You ever think about how double-slit experiment sounds like a bi-curious euphemism?"
Marie couldn't decide if she was more freaked out right now, or just pissed off to hear Macquarie make pointless remarks while attacking them. She thought she might have a solution to both, though.
"So normal humans can't see her, right?" Marie gripped Danika more tightly than before.
"Well, they can, but their brains are refusing to process her. She seems so unreal it's uncomfortable to think about. Like a memory of a dream."
"And what about us?"
"Not in relation to her. The more we interact with her, the more we're part of the dream."
"Sweet!" Marie hollered, pulled her backpack off one shoulder, fished around in it, and drew the gun.
"What the hell is that?!" Danika demanded, swerving half in shock, and half in avoiding Lara's latest barrage. None other followed; Lara fell back for a moment at the sight of the weapon and needed another to catch up.
"Eyes on the road, Dani! Let me take care of this."
Marie weighed the pistol in her hands. It was a facet of the devil itself, all firearms were - the strength to destroy one's enemies with the lift of a finger in exchange for a detachment, an atrophied empathy, a selling of the soul. She lifted the weapon to eye level and stared down its sights.
Josephine Moyes and Thomas Crawford met during a moment of impossibly thin chance midway through their high school education in the spring of 1983. Two different flavours of estranged bitterness corroded their hearts. For her, the sudden alienation from a friend circle caught up in mysterious but indisputably violent crime. For him, a lifetime of resentment borne of constant belittlement for his lacking physicality, intelligence, and wit. The two, some would say, were destined for one another. Regrettably.
In 1989, Josephine Moyes became Josephine Crawford, and indulged the ego of the man who closed his heart off to anyone but her. A year later, she found herself expecting his child: a wonderful daughter named Renee Crawford.
Renee was born on the thirteenth of March. In the strange, brazenly asinine sense of humour that flowed between them, they quickly changed her name to fit the occasion.
The thirteenth of March shortened to Mar 13, which in turn, became Marie.
Let's take a moment to unspool the holistic conspiracy dressed up as "reality".
Establishing a connection between mortal-scale notions of the ties between all things and the real strings puppeteering their reality is easy enough, of course. Most glaringly, the interconnection between all things and their identifiers. The metaeclypse we call nominative determinism. Is it any coincidence that something called the Library of Alexandria burned, when the loss of ability to read is called Alexia? Is it pure happenstance that in 1969, the first human to reach a foreign celestial body was quite literally a reverse alien - Neil A.? Could it be by chance that Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq is another arrangement of Press Had To Enquire If This Man's Dead?
Obviously not. But this is only the top layer of nominative determinism. It's pedestrian, even. We can delve deeper.
In keeping with a theme of American conspiracy theories as in those which surround these last two examples, let's turn to the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Lincoln's time in office was cut short with a bullet to the head on the 14th of April, 1865 while attending a play at Ford's Theatre in D.C.. Ninety-eight years and seven months later (and it has NOT escaped my attention that 987 is a Fibonacci number, although I have yet to figure out what that could possibly mean), Kennedy's administration was cut even shorter with a bullet to the head on the 22nd of November, 1963.
At the time, he was in a Ford Lincoln.
The number 313 resonated throughout the life of Marie Crawford, even in the positions in the alphabet her initials occupied (the third and the thirteenth, irrespectively, of course). It echoed even beyond her, from the number of the frame in the Zapruder film wherein the bullet pierced John F. Kennedy's skull, to the date Alexander II of Russia was assassinated (killed by three assassins, and in his whole life having a total of thirteen bombs and bullets aimed at him), to the time left on the clock during William Sterog's (see chapter 12) machine gun massacre at Memorial Stadium. Needless to say the gun was, at the end of a lengthy metaeclyptic string, the perfect weapon in Marie's hands. She hummed a tune to herself, unaware that it was the best-known composition of Ruth Crawford-Seeger: String Quartet '31, 3rd movement.
She took aim at Lara's chest and fired. Of course, connections of destiny fail to compensate for the absence of skill, and she missed completely. Lara understood the point loud and clear, though, and fell back right as the motorcycle broke into daylight again.
"Did we lose her?" Danika winced.
"For now. Are there any magical residences beyond the Citadel?"
"None as big. Why do you ask?"
"I think we should try getting to the closest one. Well, closest that won't let her kill me."
"My thoughts exactly. I think I know the way to one in Burwood. There are seven or eight girls living there. Can we manage that long?"
"Yeah, probably. She's not catching up."
"She's ahead of us."
"What?"
Lara was standing off to the side of the road and waving. In the hand by her side, she carried a single circular saw. She raised it, hugged it to her chest, and it disappeared.
Danika swerved again. It was only with a glance back that Marie noticed the blade had reappeared jutting out of the road and, only in spite now, shooed Lara off with two shots. They pulled off the freeway and into the wide open of city-centre bustle. The gap to safety narrowed, but they were back in their original situation - no freeway, no tunnels, and a maniac bounding from surface to surface behind them.
"Have you ever read The Handmaid's Tale, Marie?" Lara sneered.
"Of course I have. What do you take me for?"
"Yeah, didn't think so. You can think of me as an un-woman, though, if you'd like. I and all my ilk, even the girl you're embracing now (and may I say, 'ha, gayyyy'), have been systemically stripped of our humanity because our wants, needs, and actions aren't what they're 'supposed' to be. Because young women aren't 'meant' to be so powerful, we're 'meant' to be weak and passive and vulnerable. And magical girls are so far removed from that, we're treated like dirt. And if I can't have the rights of your species, you shouldn't expect me to look up to them. And when they threaten one of mine, I have a duty to stop that threat."
Marie fired another shot where she expected Lara was going to be, and missed. "You make a great point. Systemic misogyny is a very pressing issue, and people like you standing up to it make an important difference. Now can you please stop trying to chop me in half?"
The words had barely left her mind when Lara once again left her sight. Marie pointed her gun all up her right side, all down her left, all up her left and down her right again.
"I don't see her, Dani."
"Me neither. Hey we're coming to a yellow light. Should I brake or should I gun it?"
The motorcycle was right in the heart of the city now, at a busy intersection, two pairs of lanes in each cardinal direction, shadows cast on them by some of the Southern Hemisphere's most expensive office buildings, running right under the bridge the freeway elevated onto this far north. If they stopped now, they could be sitting ducks for who knows how long.
"Gun it."
Danika accelerated with Marie casting one last sweeping aim at her surroundings. Still nothing.
"Wait! Brake brake brake brake!"
"I don't have time, Marie! We're going too fast!"
Lara leapt over the edge of the bridge and threw a saw at the motorcycle on the way down. Marie let go of Danika. The saw landed directly between the two riders. Marie fell backward off of the moving vehicle and ran to the side of the road. For a split second, she caught a glimpse of Danika looking back, still careening away and now on the opposite side of the intersection. The light perpendicular was green now; they both knew there was no way back. Marie broke into a sprint around the corner of the block, figuring the more turns she took, the harder she would be to follow. She glanced backward.
Lara, however, made no use of her superhuman speed. She was walking, nay, idly strolling after Marie, completely expressionless. In her mind, Marie heard her speak.
"You know, humans survived as they have not by being the fastest or strongest predators in the world, but by being the most resilient. Our genetic ancestors were endurance hunters. They wouldn't chase, they would stalk. What I'm doing right now is the ultimate proof that we're your superiors even at your greatest strength."
Marie turned, adopted that well-balanced stance Hope had shown her, and pointed the gun at the violet jewel embedded in Lara's crown. Lara responded with a bigger sawblade than before, one large enough that she needed both hands to shape it. She held it like a shield. Marie knew her bullets wouldn't penetrate it, but seeing the girl in the mirror through its surface was the little bit of additional encouragement she needed to try anyway. The bullet, of course, bounced off harmlessly.
Lara planted the shield in the ground, leapt up from behind it, and threw two standard-sized disks Marie's way. Marie ran away again, with the blades just skipping off the pavement a moment after Lara dissipated their larger sibling and threw a third. The blade hit the footpath at an odd angle, backspun, and clattered to a standstill in the moment Marie looked over at her pursuer. She slipped on it and fell forward, the ground rising to catch her, her pace shattered, her way out narrowing, narrowing, closing, Lara bringing up two more blades...
Before she could loose them, someone else stood in her way from an approach faster than even her transhuman senses could register. Not Danika again - a figure exuding greater strength.
She was dressed in what looked like a keppel-green bathrobe, with both a bandana covering her nose and mouth, and a pair of woolen boots to match. Her sash was fixed at the back, and its loose ends seemed almost to float behind her in the speed of her arrival. She raised a hand, palm outstretched, silken sleeve hanging below the wrist, toward Lara.
"Who-" Marie began.
"What the hell kind of fresh piss swig is this?" Lara groaned, and cautiously lowered her saws.
"That's enough. Go on, Lara. Piss off."
"Fearnley?!"
"I'm letting you off with a warning this time. (How are you, Marie? You alright?)"
"(Just fine, but I didn't need your help.)"
"Is that a threat?"
Beneath her scarf, Hope frowned. "I'm not going to fight you. But if you're gonna spill blood in my city-"
"I knew it! This is a threat!"
"What, and I'm the bad guy for it? You tried to kill her!"
"She pulled a knife on a commanding officer!"
"That doesn't give you the right to blood. No matter what your organisation says. Your authority does not supercede life itself. Am I clear?"
Lara dismissed her weapons and bowed. "Last month, we agreed the last thing we need in each other is an enemy. So you know what? I'll defer to you this time. But make no mistake, Fearnley. You owe me for this."
"I have a pretty good idea of what you're gonna ask in return. And until you tell me why you want it, I'm gonna refuse."
"Then Crawford's forfeit. Get out of my way."
Lara stormed past Hope, but Hope grabbed her wrist and pulled her back.
"Let go of me!"
"D'you remember what you told me on New Year's?"
Lara didn't say anything, but she wouldn't meet Hope's eye.
"I told you what you were trying to do would kill you. Until you can look me in the eye and tell me that's not what you want my help for, you can count me out of it. I've seen too many people destroy themselves in my time, Lara. Don't let yourself be one of them."
Lara ripped her wrist out of Hope's grasp, huffed acknowledgement, and walked away. Hope watched her go, nodded, and willed herself back into her jeans and shirt.
"Oh, Marie. Thank God you're alright!"
"Hey, don't worry about it."
"I'm sorry I didn't get here earlier. You weren't easy to follow."
"Seriously, it's no pro-"
"I can't believe she'd just attack you like that."
"Fearno, please!"
"I'm just trying to look out for y-"
"She didn't want to kill me."
"What? She was throwing those blades at you."
"I know! I know it sounds crazy, but she wants me alive, for... something."
"How d'you figure?"
"She wasn't just throwing those blades at me, she was throwing them at me fast. I mean feeling-the air-current-as-it-passes fast. I mean skipping-across-the-bitumen fast. Like she was throwing them as quickly as they could split the air in front of them."
"So?"
"Think about it! Air splits faster than bone. If it didn't, moving in anything that wasn't a vacuum would break every bone in your body."
"Oh. Oh! So if one of those hit you, it'd get stuck in your ribs!"
"Yeah! Enough to horribly injure me, but not enough to kill me."
Hope found herself contained within a moment of nervous contemplation. Not imprisoned within - the door was wide open, but she was hesitant to step out into the harsh light of uncertainty. Of Marie. Perhaps she didn't intend to run so nearly parallel to Lara, but Marie, in a time like this, could full well give the Brownian path of a dust particle the appearance of certainty approaching death, and taxes.
On the other hand, Hope Fearnley had an impossibly long lifespan as her ilk went, and was seemingly untouched by the looming of death, and being eighteen years old with no job, no formal education, and, aside from a criminal record and a few forged papers to spare her having to explain her orphanhood to the law, no legal documents, so filing taxes wasn't exactly a concern of hers either.
"I can protect you if something like that ever happens again."
"I don't want you to protect me. I can look after myself, and I'll prove it."
"Yeah, well I'll have that gun back at any rate."
She reached out her hand. Marie went very still. Then, in one panicked, but elegant motion, she pointed the weapon in question at Hope's soul gem. "Yeah, and what the hell do you need it for?"
"It belonged to someone very important to me." Hope put her hands in her pockets and approached Marie at little less than an everyday pace.
"Stay back! I'll shoot!"
"What, with no bullets?"
Marie lifted the barrel to face something less vital, and pulled the trigger.
Nothing.
"How di- how did you know I was out?"
"You're not out. That thing's never had any bullets in it to begin with. Just shoots bullets when you think it will! Right now, I'm thinking harder than you that it won't. Blast one into the pavement."
Marie lowered the gun to point at the ground.
An ear-splitting pop burst from the barrel and into the concrete.
"See?" Hope waved her hands in the air. "If I wanted something to happen to you, it already would have. Now I don't know who's told you what, but I'm not that kind of sheila. I don't pick fights, you know? I like to think I'm a bit better than all that."
"Then why did you kill Sonia Vu?"
Marie never knew that Hope could look as vulnerable in that very moment. She never thought she'd watch her wince back such agony, and she definitely never expected to hear her say,
"Every day, I ask myself that same question."
She put her face in her palm, took a deep breath, and pulled it away.
"Who told you? How much do you know?"
"What, so you can fill in the gaps with your excuses?! She was your friend, wasn't she!?"
"She was my fucking girlfriend, Marie!" Hope ripped the gun from Marie's hands. "Come on, I gave you a whole week to own up and give it back. But you weren't ever intending on doing that, were you?"
"I can't let something so dangerous-"
"Oh, so you're suddenly deciding what I'm allowed, with half the facts? People of your station have a habit of taking what you don't need and I do."
"It's not like-"
"If our circumstances were exactly the same as they are now, except I lived in a house as big as your own with a mum and a dad, would you have taken that?"
Marie said nothing.
"Alright. Keep it, if you think I'm so dangerous. But you'd better take bloody pristine care of it. And you must never, ever use it."
"Or else what?"
"Is this how you people operate? Only refusing to do something if it has consequences that affect yourself?"
Marie glared at Hope. Hope glared at Marie. Both took their time in deciding that they'd said enough, but that was that.
"You wanted a way out of my world, didn't you?" Hope frowned. "I'm giving it to you. I think it'd be for the best that we never heard from one another again."
Marie sighed. "You know what? I think you're right."
"Take care of yourself, Marie."
Hope didn't wait for a response before walking past Marie, and out of her life. Marie sulked on the spot. So what if she was aggressively proactive, she thought. She was going to return it as soon as she could be sure of Hope's innocence. She'd taken it in the name of public safety, was all. She huffed. When she looked back up... well, it was hard to say through the traffic, but she swore she saw Lara standing across the street, back in her everyday jacket, a twisted grin on her face, and with the maintenance of total eye contact.
And then the van of a small curtain-fixing company (Planet of the Drapes, it was called) rushed past, and she was gone.
Something fluttered over the pavement in the zephyr the traffic kicked up where Hope and Lara had been standing. It was a thin strip of paper, written in something a fair few visits to the Citadel confirmed was not Hope's handwriting. On it, there was a phone number beginning with +49, and the words "DO NOT SHOW THIS TO ANYONE." Naturally, Marie glanced around and slipped it into her pocket.
She texted the number later that night. She was reluctant to seek allies in this world, particularly those offered to her from such unlikely places, but on the other hand, she was so sorely needing for a friend that she couldn't dismiss such a grateful offering.
-hi. ive been given your number. whats this about?
Hello! You must be Marquess Macquarie, yes? -T.K.
Marie was shocked to find herself in the position to do the single most amazing thing she had ever done in her life.
-yep. thats me
It is a great honour. I am a representative of Alex. She has told me you requested access to the last writing of Julia the Voyager once they had been translated. Would you like the photographs provided digitally right now, or would you prefer a copy via fax? -T.K.
The way she saw it, turning her down would give away her lower-than-expected level of Larahood. Asking who any of those people were, doubly so. If Lara had given her this number, it was for a purpose of such import she had spared her life. If not, then... impersonating her to steal these documents was the least she deserved.
-who uses fax anymore? just message them to me thats good enough
Very wise, madam. Please find the photographs attached to this message. -T.K.
In came photographs of two sheets of paper, marked in antique Turkish, modern German, and, of course, English. Marie read through it all. And then she read through it again. She presumed she must have mixed up details in her mind, but she was completely unmistaken.
This was part of the same story she had seen in the soul gem of the one-eyed girl.
THE ETERNAL HAND
One of the most well-known, certainly among the most invoked, goddesses of the Terran pantheon is the Eternal Hand. With the Incubator having gone to the lengths he has to ensure the secrecy of magic from most humans, he has seen to it that she be one of the most longevous, too (although as with most goddesses, she considers the time and place of her origin nobody's business but her own).
What makes her so unusual among the goddesses is her inaction. She never answers prayers by solving problems, rather, she bestows the ability unto mortals as they so request. This manifests as a crackling black aura and a firm sense of unreality. From this has arisen the magical practice of postphantasmic unusualism, the practice of (among other things) assisting humans who had retained too much from the horror of seeing a witch by acting and talking about the situation so strangely that the affected human concludes not that they had seen something they did not understand, but rather, something they could not - enough to prompt their subconscious to dismiss the affair altogether.
What makes her so interesting in this regard is that if she is applied to the human mind quickly enough, she can prevent and undo the development of the latent psychic abilities of humans. In the case of someone like Marie, however, who had been awakened four years prior, there is no means, mortal or divine, which could completely shut off her telepathy without incurring heavy memory loss. Even then, that much is not certain - most magical girls with brain damage still retain their psionics even prior to regenerating the damaged tissue.
But, of course, gods exist within the confines of the universe, and their powers, although capable of bending its fundamentals to incredibly powerful degrees, cannot break them. Such would require greater power still. These powers would be more than willing to demonstrate, save for their - our - fear of the attention of greater power still.