"Good evening, and welcome to television." - Bruce Gyngell

Were the moment neither so private nor anguished, it could be among the images that might define an era: the head of a sledgehammer balanced upon the floor, battle-scarred young woman atop it in half-lotus save for the arm straight through her legs, wrist turned down to grasp its handle as the root of the flower both tethers it to the life-bringing swamp and holds it aloft, untouched by the imperfection of the dirty water. And yet, to deny such a moment its context - all she had lost, all she was losing, the peripheral glimpses of eternity's breadth she had suffered - would erase what about this moment stood so monumental, so nightmarish, so triumphant ("and in that case", the scholars of a more enlightened era might have come to ask, "what the hell?").

ब्रह्मण्याधाय कर्माणि सङ्गं त्यक्त्वा करोति य: |

लिप्यते न स पापेन पद्मपत्रमिवाम्भसा || 10||

"Is it working?" Hope fretted, at the moment finding herself unable to remain at all inert.

"Fearno? Fearno, is that you?"

"It's me, darl! What's going on?"

"The All-Permeating Abyss. I can't contain it all in my head, it's like a storm, it's like I'm drowning inside my own brain! I can't think..."

"Cut it out, then! We'll give it a crack another time!"

"No. No, we can't. This is the only chance we'll ever have. It's okay, Fearno. I can get through it. It's just... trying to piece together... my memories..."

"Memories of what?" Zoey spurred.

"All of- well, not all of them... I remember being human, but everything after that... maybe I can work out up to when Mækiu first showed up."

"Take it from day one."

PART 2: THE CHAMPS-ÉLYSÉES IS A BUSY STREET

The Sun spilled its ichor, let in the mid-aged fatigue upon the brink of equinox, like sleet as it transited the horizon - first it drenched the peaks of towers, then trickled down to seep through every window, then to pool on the streets. The first drop thrown upon the wall of the Citadel bid Marie to stir from her position upon the couch, first to recall her circumstance, then to notice her forgoing of bloodied cloth to sleep in full armour and awake on her first day of adulthood; now she was reborn as Pallas Athena (albeit with knowledge and wisdom conspicuous in absentia).

Her rise was accompanied by joints clicking like the switchboard at the cabin of some grand vehicle, her first breath like the sigh of the engine, her body now a machine - some vehicle indeed, albeit one of cryptic purpose. She came alive, caught herself afloat in the silent light of the origin of one life, and the anniversary of another.

Audrey shambled out from her room with hair unkempt and gait disheveled. "Morning, Marie. You sleep alright?"

She shrugged. "Not terribly. Not great, though."

"Denise is still asleep, I think she was up pretty late last night. No idea about everyone else."

"Like dogshite," confirmed Hope, emerging from her threshold. "Still, though. Me and sleep aren't the tightest of chums. How are you holding up, Marie?"

"Yeah, decently."

"Really?"

"No, I don't know why I said that."

It should go without saying to any peruser of the prior twenty-one chapters that Marie had a good many troubles to confront. What she doesn't know, however, on top of her guilt, shame, self-destructive rage, and so forth is that something far more epiphenomenal had befallen her in the chaos and fallout of her metamorphosis. In a few hours, she would realise what it is and come to terms with it. But in the space of those few hours, something yet more sinister would make itself apparent to her conscience. But for the time being, the horrors with which she would cross swords were far easier to understand, less mortifyingly novel. For instance.

"Oh, also! You left your clothes on the bathroom floor last night. D'you mind putting them in the wash?"

Marie complied, drunkenly ambled into the bathroom, bumped her shoulder against the doorframe (completely painless with what little force she had to do so). She gathered her discarded polo and instantly crumpled to the floor. A cacophony of toxic odours, machine noise, and general misery overtook all other processes of the conscious mind.

"Marie! Marie, are you alright, darl!?"

"Right, I- I never paid that much attention to how clothes are made, either..."

"Bloody hell... can you turn it off?"

"I don't know. I mean, I don't like to imagine I'm going to feel this with each unethically sourced... anything I come across for the rest of my life! It's like a whole bunch of new senses. I haven't got them all figured out yet."

"But surely there are other memories attached to the bloody thing than that! Fresher ones, too!"

"It doesn't exactly work like that. I don't see individual times or dates, it's like... like I'm drawn to moments that leave a mark. Kyubey would call them moments woven thick with the threads of fate, or something. Picture it like a desert. The infinitesimally inconsequential niceties and minutiae of each moment as it passes are like grains of sand. It might be that I can see them all, can hold them in my hand, but if you wanted one specific grain of sand..."

"Right."

"And then there are bigger things. Chunks of rock sticking out of the ground. Like the time I fought a witch in this shirt. The time I reunited with Macquarie in this shirt. But there's also the time it was made."

"And you can't just... not grab some sand?"

"Alright, the analogy's not perfect!" Marie snapped. "Now... ugh. Ungh. Is it normal to regret my contract so soon?"

"I wouldn't know."

"Right. Sure. Whatever."

"You can go through some of my wardrobe, if you'd like. Pick out something a bit older, something with more memories attached to it. Maybe that'll dilute the crap taste in your mouth."

Marie nodded and complied, dazed, silent.

"And this has got me thinking, actually: this new power of yours could crack the whole Phoebe thing."

Time stood still. Marie found herself not imbued with a new purpose, but with the old one removed, cleaned out, refilled, and slotted back in. She felt it click, felt its contents begin to churn within her.

"Well, it's not like I had other plans today."

Being a smaller woman than Hope, Marie had no trouble fitting into older clothes of hers. The shirt she wore - a monochrome plaid button-up - had seen arrests, first kisses, deaths, coming outs, contracts, entire lives. The scent of its origin was faint. A half-awake Jane and well-caffeinated Denise identified all the worthwhile op-shops in the neighbourhood, none of which Marie had retained for the time being.

With Hope, she descended the stairwell. The way out had never been as much to Marie as it had now become, nor had she previously departed with purpose of this flavour. And yet...

"Wait!" Marie gasped. "I feel really faint all of a sudden..."

"D'you leave your gem on the kitchen bench?"

"Oh... oh God, I must have."

"Oi, don't sweat it. You only forget once."

Upon Marie's reunion of body and soul, Hope made a reunion of her own in her bedroom. "Heads up. You'd get more mileage outta this than I would."

Marie turned to meet the arc of a handgun cast through the air, first its ascent as propelled forth by Hope, then its zenith, and the descent that heralded. When Marie caught it, it fell no further. Its weight was no lesser, merely controlled by a new champion.

"Why the change of heart?" She lifted it to nothing in particular and squinted down the sight. She saw Danika and Phoebe enter the room, accompanied by a human girl who considered the space with a certain misprision.

"You'd better ask yourself that; I don't reckon I'm the one who changed."

Marie tracked the forehead of the human girl. Her finger trembled above the trigger. "You know what? That makes sense. But is that really enough for you?"

"To tell you the truth, mate, I don't think you deserve it. I just don't. It doesn't belong to you, I've known you for two months, you know. But need? That's a whole other question."

"Phoebe's place is up the other end of the neighbourhood, isn't it?"

Hope nodded. "Yeah, but let's get some breakfast up ya first." She indicated a corner shop. Unkempt but well cared-for, strung between two streets, both long, neither busy. The air here smelled of nothing. It was not devoid of scent, rather, its scent was simply not: not petrol, not food, not trees, not dust, not.

The bell upon the door called the introduction to the exposition of a consumeristic minuet (a reduction of a much grander supermarket symphony).

"Good morning, Hope. Good morning, ah...?"

"G'day, Mrs. Vu! This is my mate Marie, just moved house. I'm showing her around the neighbourhood, figured we might get breakfast along the way." She then continued, into Marie's mind, "This place is run by Mr. and Mrs. Vu, Sonia's folks. I first met her, actually, because they'd set up shop here while I was in detention. When I got out, my aunt Ruthy bought up what's now the Citadel to keep us outta trouble again. First day out, came here for breakfast, met her, the rest is history. Not a word, though - official story is Sonia was hit by a car, I tried to keep her conscious 'til the ambos arrived to take her to hospital, but she bled out before they could get to us."

"Shit."

"Yeah."

"Are you ever going to tell them the truth?"

"Maybe, when I bloody know what it is." Then aloud venturing down an aisle of bagged vegetables with a sun-bleaching copy of a 2-and-5 diet poster, "you hankering for anything in particular?"

"Oh, good question. It's funny. I don't usually have meat for breakfast, but now that I can't, it suddenly feels like a road's been cut off for me, even though I wasn't going to walk it."

"Is that upsetting to you?"

"I don't know, maybe?"

"Were you planning on having kids?"

"Not particularly, I guess. What's that got to do with-"

"There's no soul in your body anymore, so your body can't even do something as basic as make another Ka."

"Ka?"

"Life force, if you'd like. Buds off your own in gestation, and then the rest of the soul - consciousness, reason, all that lovely stuff, starts growing in on its own after you cut the cord."

"Jesus. T.M.I."

Down another aisle, passing a fourteen-year-old Hope trying to get the attention of a tall, thin teenager while she stacked a shelf. "My point is! Kyub already found reproductive tissue one of the hardest to magically regenerate, so he just... stopped working on the tech for it."

"Wait. So, like... my... you know, it's decaying right now."

"Correctamundo."

"...Jesus."

"It's not all bad, you know! The rest of you grows back. You can't get viral infections, since you don't have any living tissue now. And all the microplastics in your body are slowly getting picked apart into water and carbon dioxide."

"The what?"

"Oh, you dunno? Every 'uman's body has up to around a kilo's worth of tiny plastic particles in them by way of, you know, living in cities and eating and drinking from plastic containers and what-have-you. Not terribly dangerous, but..."

"...Gross."

"Spot-on. You don't need the little suckers, though, so your body's breaking them down into more useful crap."

"Into some sort of microsodawater."

"If you'd like! Oh hey, check this out."

Hope scurried to a small freezer and indicated a bag bearing the brand name 'FROSTY FRUITS'. In a pathetic larrikin drawl, she declared, "c'est moi."

That was the first time Hope had ever heard Marie laugh in complete earnest. It was gone, she thought, all too soon.

"I mean, I was vaguely aware of the whole sterility thing, and I wasn't really planning on being a mum, but to know I don't even have the option anymore, it's like..."

"It's something."

"It sure is something."

"You need a moment?"

"I need a damn egg salad sandwich and a packet of chips, is what I need."

Hope Fearnley left the corner shop having with her $9.60 fewer than she entered. Marie Crawford, meanwhile, left with an additional egg, lettuce, and spinach sandwich in an unbranded plastic container, a small pink bag of Smith's salt and vinegar potato chips, and the wisdom of a paradox. That paradox was Mrs. Vu. She had not grown the produce. She had not prepared the food. She had not packaged it, nor had she so much as retrieved it from the shelf, and she absolutely had no intention of eating it herself. And yet, if someone suggested that a woman like Mrs. Vu was a hardworking individual and deserved every cent of that $9.60, Marie would agree wholeheartedly.

"Okay, now it's my turn to pick a detour. I just realised while we were in there that Selene - and I know you don't like her, deeplighter, yadda yadda - but she doesn't know I can wrap up this case for her now. I mean even if she-" Marie took a bite of the sandwich and went terribly quiet. She shot it a stare that would make a lesser sandwich blush.

"...You alr-" Hope tried, and failed.

"Shh! Shsshshsshshshsshhhshshh!"

"What? What's up?"

"You ever see bread while it's freshly baked, and you're like... 'that looks delicious, but if I eat it now, my stomach's gonna regret it in ten or twenty minutes'?"

"You know, funnily enough, I have."

"I can taste it."

"Really?"

"Yeah, I can taste it freshly baked."

"How is it?"

"I'm rethinking my cynicism toward my contract."

Selene seemed very pleased, but very nervous, to see Marie. In other words, she was as she always was. She had been tending to her plants, currently a row of season-appropriate flowers. In other words, she was currently as she always was more than she usually was, which, naturally, was something she very often was.

"Ah! I heard the news already! I'd hug you, but I've just been applying some stuff to these flowers I do not want to get on someone's bare skin, so..."

Marie grinned. "The thought's appreciated."

"It's good to know someone like you is taking poor Phoebe's place now, though."

"I'm not... who... who told you that?"

"Oh, I don't know. I just sort of assumed..."

Hope shrugged. "You are half-right. We reckon we can bust the case open now, though."

"Really?" Selene gasped. "But we turned her whole apartment upside down trying to find the smallest trace of anything! Do you... really think you can follow up on it?"

"Hang on, hang on." Marie turned to Hope. "How does that make her half-right?"

"I didn't tell you who took over the case?"

"I don't think you... oh, no. You're joking."

"Wish I was. Selene?"

"Antonio, if you wouldn't mind. We tend to use surnames when-"

"Selene. What's the current running theory on the culprit you've got going on?"

"That one-eyed giant with too many fingers. She's killed before, you know."

"Oh, Thalia? Nah, Thalia's great. Sure, she's got a pretty bleak past, but I think we can rule her out."

Marie concurred. "Yeah, I can swear up and down she's not the killer."

Selene nodded slowly. "If you... say so. Who do you think did it, then?"

"No idea! See, the thing is I can't imagine what pretty much anyone would want her dead for. But maybe we'll find out soon!"

"Maybe... I wish I could do more than just wish you good luck at this point."

"Hey." Marie nodded from side to side. "The thought means a lot anyway."

"Tea?"

"Thanks, but we should probably get going. Right?"

Selene looked pitiable, as if trying to hide that she felt disappointed but not so much that nobody would notice she was disappointed while also trying to hide that she was trying to hide it.

"Hey, but next time for sure. I promise. And next time, we'll have dealt with whoever-"

"-killed Phoebe hid their tracks like a right bastard."

By now Phoebe's apartment was to its block as a dead tooth to an otherwise perfectly healthy mouth. The dust in the air had an elegiac stillness, the mould setting into the walls a hungry repose. Time leaked from the room, stained the carpet, dirtied the window. Rot bade rot come, rot begat rot. It sulked in the company of itself. The physical rot was minimal, but the rot of essence was foul, sharp, hostile. There was a silent understanding deep in Marie's mind that she would not step foot in this place ever again.

"Do you think we should call Lara?"

"Does she have to know anything?"

"Yeah, I guess not."

"It's gonna be a bit weird seeing her again now, ay?"

"God, I hadn't even thought about that."

"You find anything yet, though?"

"Not yet. Any trace that anyone but her was here at all is just... totally absent. No hair or fabric or drop of blood that I can find. I mean we can pretty much be certain at this point that someone killed her by magic without actually setting foot in the room, right?"

"Would setting foot in the room include, say, hovering?"

"I guess it wouldn't."

"So on a scale of ridgy-didge to skew-whiff, how close do you reckon we are to getting anywhere?"

Marie took a deep breath in, then out. In, then out. The air was too far from fresh to do her many favours.

"Let me feel around the room. Finding the moment it happened has gotta be like, like... like tuning a radio, right? Just gotta feel around until I catch a glimpse of what I'm looking for."

She commenced a fair orbit of the room, feeling out its wall for any sign of the threads of fate resonating with Phoebe's death, ignoring the bore of Phoebe pacing a thousand days behind her, living the most ordinary of triplicate lives.

"Will you know when you've got it?"

"I've got it right here."

Phoebe laid across her bed, still in the outfit she wore in the battle with the train witch. She looked uncertain about something, but not at all uncomfortable. Privately flustered, even.

This unsettled Marie, for reasons she would have dismissed only yesterday. She had certainly hypothesised that her mentor's favouritism might have been owed to some sort of romantic attraction, and here she was not hours after having just promised to spend more time with her. As a human, this had drawn Marie into a miasma of dread due to the self-hatred underlying inclinations she had only now begun to open to. As a magical girl, this drew her deeper into the miasma, because she found nobody less lovable than the human she was.

Then, without warning, the gem upon her navel split cleanly in two, and the light in her eyes was lost.

She relayed the moment of passage to Hope, albeit in fouler tongue.

"Shit! Any indication of the time of death?"

"No, there wasn't a clock in the room or anything."

"But, I don't know. Sounds outside or something? Another apartment with its telly on?"

"Oh, good point."

Marie replayed the moment, now with her ear pressed to the past like a glass on a wall of a house in a photograph.

"Some sort of soapie. A man and a woman are arguing about... I can't tell."

"That's no help."

"Maybe a quiz show?"

"Recognise the host's voice?"

"Nope."

"Nah."

Marie strained.

"...I can hear music."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I can't make out the words, but the melody, it's like..."

She began to hum. Hope joined in:

Tonight, the
Tonight, the hills are watching her
As she runs towards the sea
Yeah, she runs so she'll be free
And of all the friends and enemies she's made along the way
They are nowhere in her thoughts
As she dives beneath the waves

And he's the one that you've seen sometimes on T.V.
And his shirt is on the ground
While he's tackled by police
And the par-

"Oh, you know it?" Marie blinked.

"The Presets - Girl and the Sea. Track four on Beams. I imagine that means Rage was on."

"...What?"

"Oh, you don't watch guvvo telly? 'S an all night music show."

"On the ABC, I presume?"

"You presume correctly. Me and the girls watch it all the time. Annoys them no end that I can name most songs before they can."

"Well, it's good to know you have some kind of encyclopedic music knowledge or whatever, but that doesn't tell us the time."

"There's bound to be some record of it, right?"

Marie slowly coerced the past to the darkest boundaries of her mind. "So what's the plan? We sneak our way in to find the schedule for that night, so we get ourselves a time of death?"

"That's just about the most ridiculous approach to something like this I've ever heard."

"What's the alternative?"

"Hey, I wasn't saying no."

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's establishment in Sydney was by no metric a difficulty to reach, but Hope could only feel somewhat constrained in having to walk the whole way. Ah well, she told herself, soon enough Marie'll learn to move like a proper majjo. Or pop her clogs, at any rate.

And yet, even the private joshings of grim 'umour in her thoughts was enough to incur prime-cut, artisanal guilt. What of the fate of this girl, once out of her hair only now to wind up in her hands? What of her alignments? Was she safe, was she a problem, was she useful? She was a connection to the past, perhaps an allegorical umbilical cord. It could be there was lost knowledge she could see as clearly as the street before her. It could be there were secret regrets to be unearthed, that she breathed the shame of mistakes, past and private. It could be that the history of the very earth on which she walked was burning her skull from within.

It was, at any rate, that she was displaying the vague dysphoria of an uncertain trajectory. Hope, too, had felt the same at many points in her life, but the dread of an uncertain future was not unbreakable.

"Is something wrong, Marie?"

"Is something not?"

"Oh, fair suck of the sav."

"Well, I was just thinking... today was going to be my 18th birthday."

"Oh, strewth! Why didn'tcha say something? We coulda had a girls' night to celebrate!"

"I don't want to celebrate. I want to lay down and rot."

"It's not the end of the world, you know."

"No, I honestly kind of like it. Being a magical girl."

"Then what's the problem?"

"That it sucks, dude! It's the worst!"

"So you'd be happier as a 'uman then, you reckon?"

"No! That's also the worst! This is a different worst."

"A better worst?"

"I don't know. I just kind of like it."

"What's gotcha in such a fuss? Is it the whole lifespan thing?"

"...Yeah."

"Tell you what. If you can do two months, you can probably do six. If you can do six, probably twenty-four. If you can square away those first two years, five is no worries, and so on. It's all a matter of hanging on."

"To what?"

"Beats me. Anything you wanted to do that you couldn't as a 'uman?"

"No idea. I mean, then again, I didn't expect that sandwich thing earlier. That was pretty great."

"See? Life ain't so bad. Or... whatever this is. It ain't so bad either."

Upon the corner was the brutalist titan with its upper edge proudly displaying the unmistakable logo of a three-against-one lissajous figure. Even Marie, not by any real means a devout watcher of the channel, had seen it all too many times to count.

The front desk stood host to a young-faced receptionist whose name tag strongly implied that either he or, somehow, the tag itself, was named Kevin. The former is easier to accept as reality, and thus will be taken at face value. Alternate readings are left as an exercise to the reader.

He didn't so much man the front desk as he did haunt it with his ennui and discontent, as in the vein of la bufera infernale or Gehenna pervading and dominating the emotions of their subjects merely by being. His face was buried in a novel his grandfather gave him for Christmas. He was rapt, invested deeply, and utterly detested every word. He did not get invited to parties often, and this annoyed him, even though he knew he wouldn't enjoy them in the first place. Today, he would be granted the grand displeasure of having to answer difficult queries posed by multiple magical girls with intentions of vigilante justice, the first two of whom were entering the building at this very moment.

First up to bat were Fearnley and Crawford, each perhaps an expert in diametrically opposed styles of nuisance. It making no difference to him, he led himself by the hand up the gallows and asked,

"Can I help you, sir?"

The taller of the two, who looked very distinctly unlike a security officer, flashed a badge. "Hotel we're working at had a break-in last week. CCTV recording had been tampered with, and we'd lost some video fidelity and-"

"Sir, my question was whether or not I could help you."

"I'm getting to that!"

Kevin groaned. "Please, just tell me what you're after, show me some I.D., and we can do both our jobs faster."

"We need a backlog of everything played on Rage," the shorter explained.

"No worries. And your I.D.?"

The taller presented him with two security cards from a hotel with entirely the wrong logo. He sighed, noted their names, and loosely gestured where he wildly guessed they might find what they sought.

"That was beyond dumb," Marie sulked.

"Didn't have to make sense," Hope clicked her tongue, "just had to work. If there's one thing I learned doing time - and it feels like an overstatement to say that there is - it's how many social situations can be resolved by making some poor sod want you to leave."

"I can't imagine what specific event could have led to you learning that in juvenile detention."

"Yeah, I know," Hope nodded, and then failed to elaborate.

An intern with no idea what she was mere metres away from getting involved in called to them, "Hey, you two! Need a hand looking for anything?"

Hope beamed. "Nah, 's our second week here! If we don't figure things out ourselves soon, when will we?"

The two laughed and went their separate ways. The intern would go on to win a Logie three years later.

Maybe, at least.

Hope gasped when she found the Rage studio. Marie didn't know how to take that, aside from an indication that it may have been the right place.

"This is it!" She waved her hands in the air. "Look over there, that's the Rage couch! All the great Australian musical acts in the last couple decades have planted their arse on it! Can you imagine? Like,

it's right there."

"Uhm, that's cool. Right?"

"It's something bloody else is what it is! Go oarn, Marie, touch it. Tell me what you see."

"I'd rather not."

A small amount of the leather in the couch began its life as a distant descendant of a crocodile living along the Nile millennia ago. It burst forth from the bank, a tremendous, unstoppable beast some six metres in length, and gladly plunged its fangs into Iput's leg. She fended it off valiantly from assailing a collective of young children too close to livelier waters, but regenerating her leg had taken the last of her strength.

She laid on the bank now, hoping only that the children be distant enough to avoid her curse, but she knew not for sure. She closed her eyes, laid upon her back, and...

And found herself face to face with a legend. A priestess of hushed-tone renown, said only to wander from city to city, granting lost, tormented souls safe passage through the land of the dead.
"Go now," whispered the great priestess Nedjem. "The gods will be proud to have the honour of meeting you."

The soul gem in Nedjem's hand - Iput's soul, she realized - crumbled to dust and floated away into the black water as she recited, "There is no sin in my body. I have not...". It bubbled softly for a few moments, then settled when a shadow fell upon the priestess from behind. She turned to face her father for the first time, who finished, "...spoken that which is not true knowingly, nor have I done anything with a false heart. Grant you that I may be like to those favoured ones who are in your following."

The lights flickered. Hope stood up from the catalogue of videos she was a few weeks' worth through perusing, and Marie brought her hammer to hand on a new impulse. They both watched the door open, each with a fair idea of who was behind it.

"Marie Crawford," Francis snarled. "Bet you thought you could get away with pinning the blame on me, right?"

"I hate to sound unempathetic, but I can't think of anyone else with a motive for killing Phoebe."

"Ha. Naturally."

"So what, did you do it?"

"Don't play dumb with me, dickhead. I'm here to avenge her."

Kevin glanced up from his novel yet again. Before him was a large, bespectacled young man with snow-white hair and a tattered brown coat. He looked Kevin up and down with a perfectly blank expression.

Neither said anything. The longer anything went unsaid between them, the more they didn't say it.

"Can I help y-"

"Hi, I'm here to see Marie Crawford, please?"

"I, uh... should I know who that is?"

"Yes, she signed in a few minutes ago. I'm here to see her, please?"

"Do you have any I.D. or anything?"

"No. Can I go through, please?"

"Uh, friggen... sure, whatever. Got a name?"

"No. But I'd like to go through, please?"

"C'mon, man. Gimme a break, alright? I just need to put your name down."

"Is Pyotr Sloethorn any good?"

"Sure, how do you spell-"

The young man faded from view.

"Works for me, man..." Kevin sighed, and denoted the passage allowed to one Peter Slowthorne.

GIRLS' NIGHT

While there certainly exist a plethora of feats of strength open to only the transhuman, few are quite so intensive, infamous, or regularly practiced worldwide as the girls' night. Although the individual activities which occur within a girls' night vary regionally, there are some broad generalisations which can be drawn on a universal scale: despite the challenging nature of the event, almost nowhere does a girls' night involve any violence, and while it is intended to push participants to their limit, not all of the duress undergone is physical.

The style to which Hope Fearnley refers - the B.S.C.M. tetrathlon (Brisbane/Sydney/Canberra/Melbourne) - almost always consists of the following, although certain neighbourhoods will, of course, develop unique variations and house rules:

Shadow chess
A game wherein the usual rules of chess apply (or more casually, another similar board game, as with any two players with particularly accurate short-term memory this is otherwise almost invariably the tetrathlon event which lasts the longest), with two additions: the first is that neither the pieces nor the board may be physically touched - all movement must be conducted by enchanting the pieces to move as one wills. The second, and reason for the name, is that the player whose turn it is must be seated facing away from the board at all times. Their knowledge of the board is only to come from memory of their opponent's turn. If the enchantment of a piece wears off, its owner may not move to reapply it - it is to remain inert - but a skilled enough player might give the impression of an inert piece remaining active, or vice versa.

Two crowns
An old game, extending back in some form or other at least centuries. Both players place one another's soul gems upon their heads and must recover their own and complete an uninterrupted transformation sequence before their opponent does the same. Each player may only grab their own: they may not remove their opponents' from their head, nor may they touch it if it falls to the ground. Common variants include playing with one or both hands tied behind one's back, playing non-contact, or for the most adept at psychological warfare, playing seated across a table from one another.

Arm-wrestling
A far cry from the feat of sheer strength humans refer to by the same name, a magical girl's arm wrestling relies very little on the particulars of her musculature, given that her physical strength may be augmented to an arbitrary degree by magic. Instead, it becomes a test of endurance - the same position as in its namesake is assumed, but neither will dare to move until the other shows (or, in the case of a good bluff, feigns) weakness. Then, the weakness is incurred by placing the soul gems of both participants within a microwave oven (physically, completely harmless, but leaving both open to random, split-second bursts of complete numbness).

Table soccer
A game played by two players with a table soccer table, wherein they play a game of table soccer. The first player to win is the winner.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

(Hey guys! Today marks the first anniversary of PFDM, can you believe it? How time flies.
I thought I might commemorate the moment not only with the start of part 2 but with a couple of extra things some people might find interesting.
Previously mentioned part 1 writeup: puellafuriadarkmagica . tumblr post/672102048375930880/
End of year 1 statistics: puellafuriadarkmagica . tumblr post/672102048485048320/
See you all in another 2 weeks!)