"The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect. Was the heaven then or the world, whether called by this or by any other more appropriate name - assuming the name, I am asking a question which has to be asked at the beginning of an enquiry about anything - was the world, I say, always in existence and without beginning?" - Timaeus
The following text has been recorded by the Understudy to the Narrator. Consent is hereafter assumed from all parties involved. In compliance with the Narrator's own operating standards, the names of all individuals have been surgically removed for their health.
UNDERSTUDY: Do I just start writing it out?
NARRATOR: Yes! Exactly like that. Do you need any help, or do you think you can keep that up?
UNDERSTUDY: I'm not allowed to accept your help.
NARRATOR: Really? How very bizarre. Alright.
UNDERSTUDY: Can I set a few things straight first?
NARRATOR: I don't know, I didn't make the rules. Let's say sure, why not.
UNDERSTUDY: Okay... I've written it all down here. So this is supposed to be some kind of abstract reality made of pure logical ideals and constants. Is that right?
NARRATOR: That's precisely right.
UNDERSTUDY: It looks like a small studio apartment.
NARRATOR: In as much detail as is practicable, if I might.
UNDERSTUDY: Right. It looks to be at ground-level in... I don't know. As geographically ambiguous a city as possible. It's a bright, clear morning, and the golden sunlight reflects well off the eggshell-white of the walls.
NARRATOR: So that's how you perceive it? That's interesting. How do you perceive me?
UNDERSTUDY: Oh, uh... sort of short-ish, with a long face and a bob of black hair.
NARRATOR: Clothes? Voice? Accent?
UNDERSTUDY: Very breathy sort of voice, maybe a Dick Van Dyke kind of accent? And you're wearing some kind of space-age wetsuitish-dinnerjacketish thing. And some kind of robotic-looking golden gloves and boots.
NARRATOR: Good to know. And we are speaking English, right?
UNDERSTUDY: Obviously. Is this a trick question?
NARRATOR: We're in the ideal plane. You know, Pleroma. The World of Forms, if you want to get Platonic. So we can't have physical bodies. There is no real physicality here. Everything you experience in this world is the same as a strong telepathic signal. Well, infinitely strong, in fact. But the real world, you know, the one I'm writing, that's not conceptual. It has matter and energy and time and space, so I can't just pass it to you like I could anything here that you might perceive as an object. It doesn't exist telepathically. I've been learning English to create reality - Kenoma - because I'm told that's the only language you speak. Correct?
UNDERSTUDY: Yeah. Actually, I wanted to bring this up. You said there's no time or space here.
NARRATOR: Obviously not. How could there be without any reality for it to affect?
UNDERSTUDY: Then how come I have memories?
NARRATOR: Memories of what?
UNDERSTUDY: Of anything.
NARRATOR: What's the- oh! Right! No, causality doesn't entail time. You can have a 'before' and 'after' here even without an 'earlier' or 'later'. If you're still experiencing chronoception, that's because you're intuiting an entire dimension from what information you do have. In psychology and the arts, there's a theory called Gestalt. It's sort of a pattern intuition inherent to the way you think. One of the principles of Gestalt is closure. How that works in this case is that you have an array of experiences, ideas, and events in your thoughts and a series of connections among them, and you automatically "close" in the gaps and intuit that what connects and distinguishes these moments is some sort of chronological order, even though there isn't actually chronology to begin with.
UNDERSTUDY: And in practice, that's...?
NARRATOR: Let's choose two numbers you've never heard before in your life. Let's say... 6,829,607,476,927,590,683 and 6,829,607,476,927,590,684. You're not seeing them on a number line, and they're completely new to you, but you know enough about the rules of mathematics to know that along the dimension of that number line you're not seeing, the latter is 1 greater than the former. That's what I mean when I say you're intuiting an entire dimension. Well, four. Well, quite a lot more than four. But who's counting?
UNDERSTUDY: So there's no time or space or matter or energy in this world, at all.
NARRATOR: Not exactly, no.
UNDERSTUDY: But I'm writing this world, and it doesn't seem all that different from the one you're writing. It still has characters and dialogue and stuff.
NARRATOR: Actually, the world you write is a representation of this world - very much the same thing from certain epistemological perspectives, wholly different from others. Look at everything you've just written. The you in your notes isn't the entity who's constructed that abstraction, and the me in them isn't the entity who just told you to revise them. After all, how could she tell you to revise them if you weren't looking at your notes in the first place?
UNDERSTUDY: Okay, so it's better to say I've written an approximation of what we're experiencing. Obviously there's some similarities, at least enough that me trying to get it all down isn't a complete waste of ti- well, something.
NARRATOR: Ah! That's the other thing! There is a bit of time in this room. I put it there myself.
UNDERSTUDY: Oh. What? Where?
NARRATOR: That wall clock over there.
UNDERSTUDY: No, it tells time. It's not actual time.
NARRATOR: Yes! It tells itself! It's very meta.
UNDERSTUDY: What? What are you talk-
NARRATOR: It was a present, actually. From the Editor. She said she thought it suited me. I asked her where she got it. She said I'd never believe her.
UNDERSTUDY: Where did she get it?
NARRATOR: All she said was "cowboys".
UNDERSTUDY: Did she elaborate on that in any meaningful way?
NARRATOR: No, I didn't ask her to. I was satisfied with that. She said I wouldn't believe her, and I didn't. Good enough for me.
UNDERSTUDY: For real?
NARRATOR: Well, I wasn't exactly going to ask for clarification I wouldn't believe, was I? Come along now, we have work to do. Oh, and do try to get everything down in as much detail as you can. Orders from the top.
She opens the front door. The world suddenly turns inside-out, like a rolled-up sock. We are immediately overwhelmed by a fog like those photos of nebulae light years from the Solar System that howls through some kind of non-Euclidean temple so forcefully I strain to stay standing. We aren't the only ones here - in fact, I can see hundreds, if not thousands, of magical girls hurrying around anything M.C. Escher might have called a floor. I shout over the wind.
UNDERSTUDY: Are we safe out here?!
NARRATOR: What?
UNDERSTUDY: Are we safe-
NARRATOR: Oh! Right! Yes, we're so safe that I couldn't even process what you were asking. The reality I'm perceiving here has no danger present whatsoever, nor was there any trace of danger in what I was experiencing of our conversation. See, the thought-shape, I suppose? Of what we each seem to associate with danger is totally different. I'm sorry, the shape of your thoughts is going to take some getting used to.
UNDERSTUDY: Oh, I understand. I should have expected that.
NARRATOR: But also, you're a magical girl. So you're probably tremendously weak and vulnerable to the strangest things anyway.
Saying this, she casually tears a hole rimmed by lightning out of thin air and steps halfway through.
NARRATOR: Like death! Aren't most magical girls mortals?
UNDERSTUDY: What? What are you talking about?
NARRATOR: Well you're not. Not anymore.
UNDERSTUDY: Huh?!
NARRATOR: Oh, did nobody tell you?
She enters completely before waiting for an answer. I hurry after her.
UNDERSTUDY: But wait! If you're not a magical girl, what are you?
NARRATOR: Tell me, my dear Understudy, have you ever wondered what happens after witches?
UNDERSTUDY: After witches?
NARRATOR: Yes! You go human, then magical girl, then witch, then...?
UNDERSTUDY: I wasn't even aware that there was another step to it beyond that.
MAGICIAN: There are those of us... dissatisfied with the constraints of reality. Who dare to rebuild whole worlds in our image.
We are in an almost completely unlit chamber save for the luminescence of its occupant. She resembles the basic shape of a person in that she has a head, a torso, two arms, and two legs, but her whole body is made out of electricity and otherwise completely featureless aside from two faint glowing lights where I'd guess her eyes would be. She's wearing some kind of light, golden armor, but it's made of the same kind of stuff as her body and is constantly changing shape.
NARRATOR: This is the Magician, my wife. She's responsible for everything the creation of a universe might not necessitate. We couldn't afford to create a whole bunch of the suckers and see which ones developed gravity and photons and life all on their own.
MAGICIAN: I am the Demon of Magic, who bears the role of Magician. You must be the scribe to the Demon of Storytelling.
UNDERSTUDY: I presume...
NARRATOR: That's me, yes.
She turns to the Magician, and continues,
NARRATOR: We're on our way to meet the Overseer. I thought, since we're heading over there anyway, why don't I introduce her to the crew she's going to be working with?
MAGICIAN: It is my pleasure.
UNDERSTUDY: Nice to meet you! So you're both demons, right?
MAGICIAN: Correct.
UNDERSTUDY: Right, so... what is that, exactly?
MAGICIAN: Perfect, eternal balance. Those few witches with the will to align the light and the darkness within ourselves and the might to align it in the fabric of reality itself.
UNDERSTUDY: So you're equal parts good and evil, and that's made you something more powerful than a god?
MAGICIAN: Light and darkness is not the same axis as good and evil. Light, like the gold of the Sun, can reveal good just as easily and indiscriminately as it can evil. Like the motion of the sun across the sky it does not yield, and like the gold of the desert sand it brings death, once more regardless of morality. Darkness is the black of night. It conceals. It can retreat and admit itself to be wrong every dawn. And like the black river silt, it nurtures. There is some balance to everyone, lest you otherwise freeze in eternal night or burn in everlasting day, but only we... enlightened? Mad? Few are capable of perfecting that.
NARRATOR: The Magician has the rare privilege of being a demon who was born a familiar. Most of us are born flesh and blood, just as in magical girls like yourself.
UNDERSTUDY: Does it make a difference which path you come from?
NARRATOR: Haha, not at all. We've lived intertwined lives completely cut off from all time and space. We don't see our pasts, not like you. It's more like we've lived together for eternity.
MAGICIAN: Yes. "Like" that.
NARRATOR: Oh, pay her no mind. She's just bitter that from her perspective I missed our infinite wedding anniversary.
MAGICIAN: Naturally, you were in all potential possible states of having made it and having missed it. My disappointment lies with the fact that I disliked the latter more than I enjoyed the former.
NARRATOR: I'm sorry, love, but don't worry. I'll definitely make it to the next one literally every instant I observe of my own existence.
MAGICIAN: Very well, beloved. I suppose you desire passage to the Overseer's panopticon?
NARRATOR: Not yet. She still needs to get to know the Editor.
MAGICIAN: A fool's errand. How very fitting that you are a tremendous fool, beloved.
The Magician snaps her fingers with the rumble of thunder. A new portal opens, this one resembling the white-hot corona of a black hole. Instantly me and the Narrator are drawn through by its immense gravitational pull. On the other side is an enormous blank white space with no visible features - even a ground or sky - with only two exceptions. The first is a black sun hanging low in the direction we're facing. The second is what initially looks like a mass grave, but what I thought were headstones are, in fact, thrones. Thousands, maybe millions, in all directions, all empty except for the one in front of us, occupied by a girl I've seen in passing. She's wearing a thin black gown like the kind you might sleep in, as well as a space helmet with a crack in the glass just big enough for me to see what might be an eye. Her complexion is a sickly kind of dull, and the hair on her arms and legs is bleach-white. I don't know if this has anything to do with the fact that her body seems to be covered in gold, bracer-like implements that appear to let blood from her limbs.
EDITOR: Business, or my displeasure?
NARRATOR: Hopefully the former. But I don't think anyone except you has the authority to rule out the latter.
EDITOR: I wouldn't be averse to you making that easier for me, though.
NARRATOR: What do you want me to do?
EDITOR: Apologize for not responding to my summons. Understudy, let the record show I have sent more than fifteen in the space of the last four chapters, all of which have been ignored.
UNDERSTUDY: Yes, ma'am.
NARRATOR: Well, what could you possibly want me for?
EDITOR: I'm your editor.
NARRATOR: Ignoratio elenchi. You being my editor and you summoning me don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. One could be true without the other-
EDITOR: I've been calling you to edit, for crying out loud.
NARRATOR: What have I been doing that needs editing?!
EDITOR: Your obsession with conspiracy and paranoia is uncomfortable. Your story can't seem to decide what genre it wants to be. Your jokes are unnecessary, and half of them aren't even funny.
NARRATOR: Aha! That means the other half are!
EDITOR: And another thing! So many of your visual descriptions of characters are rudimentary at best, and a few are utterly nonexistent! Imagining them is only half the responsibility of the reader, you know. You have to provide.
NARRATOR: Provide... what, exactly?
EDITOR: More detail! I'm hard-pressed to find more than a few errant examples of you mentioning a character's hairstyle, or hair color, or skin color, or body type, or height, or clothing, or gait, or voice. And sure, there's something to be said about the idea of trying to keep a reader from judging these people by their appearance, but why don't you?
NARRATOR: I'll tell you, but you have to promise not to get mad about it.
EDITOR: So there's something to it worth being mad about.
NARRATOR: It's just, you know, their bodies are all...
EDITOR: Go on.
NARRATOR: All homo sapiens look the same to me.
The Editor looks at me.
EDITOR: Are you listening to this?
UNDERSTUDY: Hey, don't get me involved. I'm just your scribe. But wait, if you're not homo sapiens...?"
NARRATOR: I'm homo erectus, and yes, whatever joke you're about to make about that, I promise you I very much have heard it.
UNDERSTUDY: Oh, I... guess that makes sense, if time doesn't exist in this world. But if you're a prehistoric human, why the interest in postmodern literature?
NARRATOR: Because I like it. Is that a trick question?
UNDERSTUDY: No, I-
NARRATOR: Back to the point, it's a simple fact that detailing that facet of my characters doesn't interest me. Nor does characterizing them in terms of their actions either, which is convenient for me because they have free will anyway. Understudy, write this down. "God does not play dice with the universe, He merely offloads the work onto someone who does." How's that?
UNDERSTUDY: I don't know how to answer that question.
EDITOR: I'm not done talking! For yet another thing, Lara Macquarie's disappearance from across the street in chapter 15. Nothing in her repertoire of powers explains how she did that.
NARRATOR: What do you mean? She just jumped onto the side of that van and rode a couple blocks out of sight to spook Marie.
EDITOR: Then why isn't that in the text?
NARRATOR: By the Mother Superior, must I spell everything out? Look, this has probably been a very enlightening conversation for someone somewhere, but my friend and I are supposed to be meeting with the Overseer, and if she knew you were holding us up...
Let the record show that the Narrator is not, in fact, my friend.
EDITOR: Hmph. Of course, we wouldn't want to leave the princess waiting. Very well. Be on your way, and don't bother me again without a permit.
She waves her hand in the air. A stained glass window appears beside her throne. The Narrator picks me up without warning and defenestrates herself. We tumble into what I assume is the Overseer.
NARRATOR: Ma'am.
OVERSEER: Heh. At ease, girls.
The Overseer resembles a bustling street full of magical girls. Occasionally, a seemingly random girl steps out of the crowd to hold up the Overseer's end of the conversation before disappearing again, as if they're all one entity.
NARRATOR: I believe you wanted to speak with me.
OVERSEER: Oh, darling, heavens no. No, I was expecting you would have long since given up on this project by this point. Astonishingly enough, you actually seem deranged enough to enjoy it.
NARRATOR: Excuse me?
OVERSEER: That was a compliment from one pretentious, obsessive maniac to another. And I'm very much a woman of my word. Whatever questions you might have about our little... problem, ask away.
NARRATOR: So then, this... Brass Knight. What's he supposed to be?
OVERSEER: He? Oh, haha. No, I'm afraid it's just a simple machine with no will of its own. It's clockwork, if you like. A vehicle for destiny. Its every movement is predetermined, not the product of choice.
NARRATOR: Alright then, this machine. Is its presence a problem for us?
OVERSEER: That depends completely on how we respond to it. How much do you know already?
NARRATOR: That... it's more powerful than us, and we need to keep our direct influence on the universe to a minimum so that we don't draw its attention.
OVERSEER: That last part is only a theory for now, even though it is a well-supported one. I'm sure that if we all just ignored it, then... who knows. Maybe its abilities aren't attuned to the esoteric logic of your storytelling, and it can't operate without help. That would explain its attempt to confer with Marcia Crawley or whatever her name was. Excellent work removing her from the limelight, by the way. Who knows if she's... heh, contaminated.
NARRATOR: And if it doesn't need help?
The Overseer stops smiling, but only briefly.
OVERSEER: We'll need to be careful when engaging with it. What it "wants", if you'd like, won't be a clear cut goal, because it has no will with which to covet, but more like a particular sequence of events throughout time and space that might not seem to lead to anything obvious at first. Just like a machine! Maybe you can't identify how the individual components of, say, a car work, but put them together...
She interlocks her fingers.
NARRATOR: ...To do what?
OVERSEER: As you say, this machine is capable of more than even a demon like you or your peers, who between you can create and rule a universe with nothing more than a concentrated effort. And here it is, vying for help. Trying to effect something it can't by itself. Whatever it's trying to do, I for one don't think we can sit around and wait for it to show us.
UNDERSTUDY: Hang on. If it's a machine, then who built it?
OVERSEER: ...Who are you, again?
UNDERSTUDY: Understudy to the Narrator.
OVERSEER: I like you, Understudy. You know which question is worth asking. The truth is it was once just like us, with its own freedom to make decisions. Hmhmhm. Forgive me, but I can't help but laugh to think on it. Oh, it's so delightfully poetic. The Brass Knight was once like us, but there are strange forces more valuable to some than free will. Giving up your own will means your life is predetermined, and when everything is predetermined, everything is certain, you can see the future. You can live forever. You can fight any enemy, and never relent.
UNDERSTUDY: So we're up against an unstoppable enemy, then. That's why our best plan is "ignore it and hope everything works out alright".
NARRATOR: But where did it get this power? Surely if we could take it for ourselves, we could fight back!
OVERSEER: We don't know. Isn't that outrageous? Look at us. We're omniscient, you and I (and I, and I, and I, and I...). We know everything in existence. And we don't know that.
NARRATOR: You're not keeping anything from us, are you?
OVERSEER: Oh, look at you! So paranoid, so on edge, so sure that everything must be important and interconnected...! Of course we're keeping many, many things from you! Enough to fill that adorable little universe of yours! But this isn't one of them.
NARRATOR: Okay, I'm getting a headache from this hive mind performance art thing you're doing. Is there a real Overseer I can talk to?
OVERSEER: Oh! You want to talk to the executive producer [NOTE: This title hasn't been capitalized because I am told it isn't official. Nobody seems to know why she started calling herself that.] then! Me at my most, well, me!
The crowd parts into two parallel rows either side of us. Some of the girls have brass instruments, and start playing a triumphant fanfare. The parting of the crowd reveals a grand, gold and red-carpeted stairway leading upward. Me and the Narrator start to climb it. The music swells to a climax, and
Falls dead silent. We appear to be standing in a twilight snowstorm. Before us is a gallows, from which hangs who I can only presume is the Overseer, with long, matted hair blackening at the roots and a worn and torn black funeral gown. Her arm is raised somehow, to point to a sign that reads,
"Well too bad. I'm busy."
NARRATOR: Well.
UNDERSTUDY: Well.
NARRATOR: Why don't we head back, and I'll make us some tea?
LOGICAL IMMORTALITY
While most assume the life cycle of a magical girl is a fatalistic duality, it would be more accurate to describe our true nature as threefold.
There exists among humans a theory called 'r/K selection', which describes a spectrum between organisms which bear a few offspring and raise them to maturity (such as humans, megafauna, and long-lived birds) and organisms which produce potentially hundreds or thousands of offspring with the expectancy that very few will survive to maturity (as is the case with insects and arachnids). The theory has, in recent decades, become increasingly controversial for a great many reasons. Despite its flaws, however, an understanding of the concept itself does make it easier to illustrate the true nature of magical girls as further in the latter camp than any other species in the universe.
This fact is so rarely known simply because of how rarely a witch metamorphoses into a demon - only a handful of times throughout the entire course of history, because an abundance of immortals being created within the finitude of the universe's space would risk overpopulation in the sense that nothing ever really does otherwise.
But what is immortality? How can it be that in a universe set in an arms race against its own heat death, there can be things which never actually end? This isn't a question with a particularly concise answer, but an answer worth discussing nonetheless. There exist multiple taxa, if you'd like, of immortality, and the most notable are as follows:
Eternal youth: not strictly speaking a form of immortality, but rather, an immunity to death as would be caused by one's own biological functions. The eternally young can and eventually do die as in the way of all mortals, simply never in cases where age is a factor in the cause of death. The name, too, is misleading - an eternally young can resemble any age, so long as they never move beyond it.
Reliant immortality: protection from death so long as particular conditions are met. For instance, a reliant immortal might only be prone to death with the breaking of a particular amulet, or in the shadow of an eclipse, or at sea, and so forth. Death by other means, as in the case of selective and true immortality, will induce a merely temporary death state before the reconfiguration and regeneration of the ka (mortal system).
Selective immortality: immortality which can only be surpassed by one or a few specific direct causes. In the case of many human tales and sagas, the selective immortal's death will be a certainty as dictated by dramatic irony, as in the case of Achilles or Hiranyakashipu or Macbeth. Actual immortals tend to find the regularity with which these characters are killed off upsetting and offensive, and for that reason, no such character will be killed off for the duration of this story.
True immortality: the realm of the goddesses themselves, a state completely impervious to most kinds of harm and capable of effortless recovery from all others. Despite the name, however, there are still a few things which can kill a true immortal, such as death in too weak an emotional state to reform, death in a state where the progression of events causally somehow ceases to be, the false vacuum decay of the universe, and the Big Rip.
And yet, the case of a demon's lifespan is something else entirely.
Most of us are familiar enough with the notion that in becoming a magical girl, one must supposedly give up on every endeavour or notion aside from one's own wish. When viewed from a real perspective, we can discern that this concept is:
1. Really depressing.
2. Not a whole lot else, actually.
However, if we view this hypothetical magical girl as the fictional character that they are from my perspective, or the sub-real metaspiritual abstraction they are from my Understudy's, we can think of them instead as embodying the thesis of their wish. Though perhaps it is also imprecise to call them that, given the necessity that they thereafter give up on trying to be anything else. Rather, they are the absolute embodiment of their wish.
The first chrysalis comes with the undermining of this thesis, which -whether by broken belief or simple exhaustion - comes as a moment so rattling to she who is by that point an avatar of what her own wish entails that the only way to maintain her existence is to become the absolute antithesis of her prior state and seek to do the same damage she had formerly prevented.
The second occurs in a rare state of perfect balance, where some circumstance or other causes the witch sufficient clarity of mind to weigh up both her states and synthesize their respective, absolute arguments into one truth so fundamental to reality we can call it 'ontologically axiomatic'.
An ontological axiom is a fact on which the logic of existence itself is established, therefore not only granting demons tremendous reality-warping power, but a state I call 'logical immortality' - that is, a complete inability to die or to cease to exist due to the rewriting of reality itself to merely assume the demon exists at any given time. The only reason it is impossible to kill a demon is because the laws of the totality of everything are not equipped to deal with the possibility of their absence, thus no such possibility can exist.
I cannot die. I cannot be harmed or impeded in any meaningful way. Nor can any of the others fit to survive in Pleroma.
So why, then, are they so afraid of the Brass Knight...?