"The mask of humanity does not fit every face." -unknown

"...What?" Marie finally scattered the silence, which had settled like an oily film on old soup.

"It means I'm here to retaliate on her behalf, I mean-"

"No, no, I know what it means. But why are you here to do that?"

"Because one of yous facken killed her, and the other's covering it up! Alright?"

"What ma-"

"Don't play stupid, I know you did it."

"That's-"

"And Macquarie's given me permission to solve it on my own, so I get free rein to do with you what I want!"

"So y-"

"So I'm going to kill you, yes."

Hope tensed. "Marie... let me handle this."

Francis sneered at her, waved her hands in the air. "Handle? You're gonna handle me? I'm not going down without a fight."

Darkness struck like a wave, like a sudden flash of simply being, and once it had sat around long enough to burn, bright, crackling power appeared within, coaxed it into shapes, decided what it was and what it was not. Where the two met, they wrung themselves out into sequences, rules, functions. A textbook-quality example of perfected form, now anointed upon Francis as bright orange metallic armour.

Marie followed suit. She noticed a vague similarity between the design of her own outfit and of Francis's. In all likelihood, they had their magical girl subtype in common. Hell if she could remember what each one was.

Hope was conspicuous in her abstinence, however. "If you're answering to Lara, then she can confirm that we're not your enemy."

"I've heard about this. They say when you were younger you'd try to stall your way out of a fight."

She stepped closer, close enough for a Glaswegian to kiss their partner. "Well, you heard wrong. What I do is try to stall other people's way out of fighting me."

Francis manifested a dirk for Hope's ring finger, but before it could connect, she herself was in her own seafoam-green bathrobe, and her soul gem at her navel. She caught Francis's wrist, and some of the sigils tattooed upon her wrists began to glow. Francis went over her shoulder first as if she was weightless, and then like she weighed significantly more than her mass would account for.

And yet, Francis was markedly unshaken by this. She elaborated on the action, following up in cleanly sweeping Marie off the floor. A second sweep, this time to the head, but Marie caught her ankle and displaced her balance while she herself rose to her feet. Francis replied with the dirk into her wrist, then twisted. Marie gagged in agony. The moment the blade left her, she fell to her knees, sluggish, and noticed now that the weapon was alight with orange sparks.

They were Daughters of Pride. Parasitoids, who perpetuated their own existence by taking from their pathetic surroundings. Francis had just drained some of her bioelectricity. So, then, what-

Marie's train of thought was shut down by a black-and-orange boot, complete with heel, crushing her bleeding wrist. She cried out at what she felt was the threshold beyond which she could not express, perhaps not even comprehend, the full weight of the pain she was in. Francis smirked until Hope's elbow upon the back of her neck sent her sprawling over her victim. She scrambled up, grabbed Marie by the neck, and pressed the dirk gently against her throat. When Marie tried grasping at her wrist, she responded with a short, stunning jolt of electricity.

Before Hope could take another step closer, Francis parted her third and fourth finger just enough to show that the throat happened to be exactly where Marie's soul gem was located.

"I know I'd be an idiot to go you head on, so if you play around, she's the one who's gonna suffer for it."

"Bloody hell. You don't listen, do you?"

"Not until I'm certain neither of you murdered my ex, actually, no! I do not!"

"If I might cut in," Marie tried, "heh, 'cut in'-"

"Shut it! What's wrong with you?"

Hope sighed. "Okay, you've got a hostage. Well done. What are your demands? Because you'd already said you were planning on killing both of us."

"You shut it too! I'm not-"

A beat.

"Wait... no, you're right. That doesn't make any sense. Where was I?"

"You feeling alright, Frank?"

"Don't call me... uh..."

"Are you two feeling a tad faint right now? Because I bloody well am, all of a sudden."

"Yeah... I... I think I am."

Marie tried again. "For what it's worth, I'm feeling really good right now. You know, given the circumstances."

"You know, you're really starting to annoy me." Despite herself, Francis let go of Marie and stepped back.

"Marie..." Hope mumbled.

"Yeah, I gathered."

"Marie!"

Marie and Francis both turned to Hope.

"No wonder you were the only one who slept well last night." She pointed at Marie's throat, who in turn removed the gem and held it up to the light.

She saw two black trails emanating from its core, one feeding into Hope's gem, the other, Francis's.

Francis recoiled and screamed, although her strength in either task was waning. "Wh- what kind of m-monster are you?"

"Marie. Marie, stop this. Stop it now."

"I- I...! I don't know how!" Her panic was not making her soul any emptier of distortion to feed into the others.

"Just... please... try to imagine yourself in control. Try to cling onto that image."

It was something Marie had never considered in any realistic capacity before, least of all now with her life as changed as it had been not one day ago. And yet, she had to. She pictured her grip on herself tightening and focused on that - so much so she hardly noticed she'd clenched her empty fist, let alone tight enough to cause agonising muscular tension. And as she concentrated, she felt, quite tangibly, the dark streams cutting off. All three gasped for air.

Hope helped herself up off the ground with a grief seed pressed up against her midsection. "Oh, that feels better."

Francis collapsed onto her front, and Marie just stared at her hands in silent horror.

"Good thing I brought a few of these little suckers, ay?"

"What the fuck... what the fuck... what the fuck...?" Marie mouthed.

Telepathically, Hope passed onto her, not as a friend, but as a mentor, "Don't sweat it. We'll get it under control this arvo, yeah? Now I'm gonna try lending her a hand, so be ready to draw your gun, or whatever it is your weapon is."

"A hammer."

Hope hesitated in her stride toward Francis for a quarter-second. "Really? Is that all? Crikey! Good thing we got you that gun, then."

She squatted down before Francis and held her grief seed out.

"There's still room in this one for whatever you wanna pour into it, but if you need a spare, I can rush home and getcha one."

Francis didn't move.

"Take the grief seed, Frank."

"From you? I'd rather die."

"Well good for you, darling, because you're bloody well about to! Now shut up and take the grief seed!"

"Fuck you."

"Marie? Get ready."

"Now?"

"Now."

Francis's gem roared to life, sleeting darkness, breathlessly screaming colour, splitting the world in half. Eight Lichtenberger tendrils shuddered their way through the cracking glass. Papers and tapes and furniture flew every which way. Marie and Hope readied their weapons, and out of the corner of her eye, the former could make out a black-haired figure in a blood-red cloak. The Dark Rift, she supposed.

A titanic lightning cephalopo free from her gem in choppy, disjointed bursts, and tore her way out of the room.

Hope lowered her railgun first. "She's just gonna leave, ay? That's... worrying."

"She just fully formed and got away?!"

"I know, darl. I was there."

"Witches can't do that! ...Can they?"

"Do you wanna tell her that?"

Hope didn't wait for an answer. She bolted back out into the hall, and Marie followed soon after. The corridor was a dead, gutted beast now; the octopus's specialty had not been subtlety even in life. Therefore, tracking it was not a matter of detective work. Athletically, however...

Marie threw herself against the floor, its gravitational field now deforming in the chaos of witchcraft, to avoid gutting herself on fibreglass and frayed copper wires ripped from the wall. She rebounded on one hand. Hope took her other (still in terrible pain from being stabbed, stepped on, and clenched tighter than she would have been able to with her former human strength, although the actual wounds were already beginning to heal), and led her along. They bolted past a bouquet of broken pipes protruding from the ground, just barely scraping by without fracturing a few ribs or careening into the next wall on the rancid water which drooled out from the cracks.

They were close enough now to see the witch slink up the stairwell with elegance unbecoming of its sheer scale.

"Hang on!" Marie shouted. "Isn't this the top floor?"

"Is it?"

"Yeah, for this section of the building. There's a fire exit map on the wall back there. She's trying to get to the roof! What for?!"

Hope stopped and stared straight up. "Way out with the least people, I s'pose."

"What are you-"

With all her strength, Hope jumped on the spot.

In the final moments of the life of Miriam West, she had bestowed upon her daughter her undying protection. Magically, that manifested at complete invulnerability to any harm. Such immense power, of course, was an immense drain on the soul, and thus, Hope had made a rule that unless her life depended on it, she would refrain from any more than ten seconds of use a day. Needless to say, where her body met the ceiling, it was not the former which yielded.

She dropped back down to hoist Marie up onto the roof with her, the design of which had the quirk of being segmented into five identical slopes like the teeth of a saw. The witch finished hoisting the last of its mass out of the roof access door, and (presumably, although it was hard to tell) turned to stare at them.

"Okay, so the sitch as I see it is that right now we've gotta kill a witch that wants to murder us both and/or escape, upon the latter of which, there will be an electricity-powered monster loose in the CBD of the most electricity-consuming city on the continent."

Marie swallowed, then nodded.

"All in all, not the best of first days, is it?"

"Could be better."

Hope pounced at the cephalopod with a railgun at the ready, and loosed a bolt at her. It only scratched her electric flesh, at which point it became galvanised and stuck to the metal roof. The witch approached, and she fired another, and another, to the same avail.

"Marie, d'you reckon you could cover me here?"

Marie stared down the sights of her handgun. She was shaking. Sure, she had fired at Lara before, but this felt... pitiable. Despite the immense difference in power she felt, it hit her like the idea of putting a wounded animal down.

Upon her reaching Hope, Marie couldn't help but notice the leviathan look her up and down like Francis would have. She didn't fire until the witch tried to bat Hope away. Totally harmless to both parties even though it did hit its mark (Marie being better metaeclyptically aligned with it now), but enough to distract the former out of hitting her own target. Sensing a bigger problem, the living storm put aside her fight and picked a new one.

"Shoot!" Hope shouted.

But Marie did not shoot. She barely even moved.

"Or anything! Just do anything you can!"

Why couldn't she do anything? What was going on?!

"Marie! You've gotta kill her! I'm sorry!"

"I can't! I can't do it!"

There was rage beaten into her which did demand blood for Francis's cruelty. But her inhibitions only served to remind her that that had once been a girl about her age, who had looked forward to much, who had loved and lost, and though she would not love again, those memories might still have been somewhere in there. Somewhere within her. Therefore, she needed her inhibitions out of the way. She needed her mind cleared. As the beast hurtled her way, she had no time to meditate. She had to do this the fast way.

She had noted one particular point of damage to the magical girls she had watched fight that would reduce them to wounded animals, that would expose their survival instincts. She had, too, exactly what she required to imitate the wound.

Hope caught up to her just in time to hear the unmistakable pop of Sonia's pistol, and see the metal slope beside Marie glisten red.

The blood already ran down to her neck. She dropped the pistol.

"Marie!"

There was a distance in her eyes that distinguished her well from Marie. She - or, no, it - raised its hand and conjured a hammer. It no longer had a concept of patience, or in fact of anything, only the intention of its own survival, of asserting itself the strongest beast in the concrete jungle, and right now, a tremendous lightning phantom bearing down on her, she did not wait for it to arrive. It jumped at the beast with strength Marie would not have known. She tried to grab it in one of her tendrils, her screaming beak snapping with bolts of electricity, but merely batted it aside. It rebounded, hammer still high, and beat against her form, desperate to forge shapes into the storm like Mjölnir but its amorphous flesh shifted and softened wherever she struck. And yet she herself was not faring much better, her foe's ire was hardly abated by her next attempt to grab and crush it, off which it propelled itself into another strike, then falling back, then another from the opposite side. Even when it decided its hammer was a useless tool, it took instead to tearing and biting at her flesh, spurts of amber ichor showering its face from every shredded pore of lightning skin while she struggled to grasp it and tear it end from end. Hope couldn't tell which one was the witch anymore.

She cast off her mortified trance just in time to see the roof tremble. She scrambled and caught Sonia's handgun a moment before it shook off the edge, and turned and aimed it at the monster, who meanwhile had grasped Marie's mindless body and sprouted a halo of a thousand concentric kaleidoscopes. Kaleidoscopes spreading to cover the sky, to cross the ground, to push out everything else.

PUT AWAY YOUR WEAPONS

THEY ARE NO USE

AND YOU HAVE MADE ME LIKE A GOD

I AM INVINCIBLE

HOW COULD YOU TWO

THINGS OF FLESH AND BLOOD

HOPE TO DEFEAT A STORM WITHOUT A SHAPE

WITHIN HER OWN DOMAIN

AND YOU HAVE MADE ME STRONG

CRAWFORD

NEVER AT A LOSS FOR UNNECESSARY WORDS

NOW CHOKE

HERE THEY CALL THIS DEAD AIR

BUT YOU WILL CALL IT A LACK THEREOF

AND YOU HAVE FILLED ME WITH HATE

FEARNLEY

SO EAGER TO ASSERT YOUR STRENGTH

NOW STRUGGLE AGAINST MY OWN

WHERE EVEN ONE ARM CAN ACHIEVE THAT WHICH YOUR ENTIRE BODY CANNOT

AND YOU HAVE TRIED TO STAND IN MY WAY

AND BOTH OF YOU

YOU HAD FED ME ON YOUR INNER DARKNESS

NOW I FEED ON THE REST OF YOU

BEHOLD THE

Without warning, the labyrinth tore in half, witch and all, like paper being ripped and scattered. Marching out onto the rooftop, at the origin of the rip, was the flickering and twisting image of a portly, silver-haired, beet-red-faced man, the distortion centering upon the tip of an index finger extended in the direction of the beast-no-more, like a feeling of the humblest tension pulling weakly at great distances, like a magnet through his body, and like that tension he snapped into and made upon the direction of Marie, who for all the world looked to be violently ripping her mind from a dream, back into the excruciating blare of her regenerating conscious.

Hope jumped in the way. Three sigils tattooed down her arms flared to life, and a small shield of light demanded he keep his distance. "Woah there, mate! What's all this?"

"Don't worry about it, this has nothing to do with you," he insisted, and wormed his way through the aegis. "Nothing business, it's just personal."

He glowered down the length of his arm, a straight path between two points - himself and the ordinally-jagged square jewel on Marie's collar - regardless of whether or not any other entity would intersect that line.

"I still have a few seconds left for the day. C'mon, try hit-"

The next two-fifths of a second were fully booked. Marie yelped and flinched out of a bad dream, Pyotr shunted into a public restroom the next neighbourhood over, and a bolt of disaster loosed itself from his fingertip, into the mirror, and back at him. He narrowly contorted his centre of mass down and out of the way.

He panted. He looked around the room, and the warping dissipated.

He nodded to himself, and concluded, at last:

"What?"

He looked on his audience of tiles and grout, and addressed them, "What?"

If the thing he thought as of it just happening just happened did, in fact, just happen, that had... interesting implications. The first, and most troubling, is that whatever whipped him up and landed him in a public restroom could get worse. That he could, in fact, need to deliberately make it worse in the near future. The good news is he now had data to support a theoretical model of physics and disprove another three, which was always a mark of a good day's work.

The very good news is that he had overestimated the difficulty of fugitivity. The Concordance didn't stand a chance of figuring out where he was right now. Not even he knew where he was right now, and he should know - he was him.

And while they weren't raining merry hell upon him for his crimes he would argue "made sense in context," he had at least an opportunity to admire the view. The human body was inspired, he congratulated himself, and it came in-built with some sultry instincts which further pushed him to compliment himself on aesthetics. A shame, almost, to consider what new form he might have to take up when he took to hiding away in whatever darkened corner of the universe he would eke out.

Meanwhile, in the lives of two characters of any significance whatsoever, Marie doubled over and vigorously urged the last of her old tissue, now replaced and disintegrating, out of her left ear.

"Don't do that again," Hope urged.

"Which part of that?"

"I dunno, just... don't."

She rubbed the last of the dissolved bone and fat out of her pinna and shot up. "You know, it felt damn good, though. For the time, I completely forgot I killed her."

Silence, but for the warmth of autumnal winds.

"I can't blame you for that. I offered her a seed, and she didn't take it."

"If it weren't for me, she wouldn't be dead!"

"Oh, don't give me-"

"Am I wrong?"

"It doesn't matter. 'If' doesn't matter. 'If' isn't the life you end up living, so worrying about it isn't gonna get you anywhere."

"How can you say it like it's that easy?!"

Hope winced. "I'm sorry."

"No, I'm sorry."

"Tell you what. I know this one fish and chippie over in Bondi. Lemme buy you some chips to cry into, ay?"

It is a well-known, but barely-spoken rule, that the more expensive the neighbourhood is to live in, the more intolerably greasy the chips are. And the worse the chips taste, the better they taste to eat while crying. The place Hope spoke of had, incidentally, some of the worst chips ever gazed upon by mankind in its infinite hubris.

The trek back whence they had come (or at least it felt like a trek) was slow and arduous (or at least it felt slow and arduous). Either Marie was passing in and out of consciousness, or the world around her was. She stumbled. Hope caught her shoulder and righted her, and the two finally noticed something which had bothered them their whole descent.

"These halls are looking pretty good, for something that was supposedly being smashed up and torched not twenty minutes ago."

"Strewth. I reckon that chap on the roof had something to do with it."

"What was his deal, anyway? All I remember are vague senses of power and danger."

"That was all I got from him too, really. That, and him being a bit of a weird bugger. Had a mad look in his eye, didn't talk a lotta-"

"Hang on, wasn't the Rage archive back that way?"

"We're leaving. He could come back at some point."

"You don't think you could stop him?"

"I don't wanna get into another smash this morning."

She paused before they returned to the lobby to recall illusions of two I.D. cards.

"Oi, they looked like this, right?"

"I think so."

"Righto."

They crossed the lobby again, Hope taking special care to flash the cards at Kevin from a distance lest she have remade them erroneously. He, meanwhile, was doodling people he disliked being dismembered in various ways in the margins of his logbook: the greatest and most spectacular exercise of his imagination since his preteen years. Marie pulled away from Hope and leaned on his desk.

He looked up, then back down. "Can I help you?"

"There was, um, ah... Fearno, what did he look like?"

Hope shrugged and sidled up to her. "Tall, fat guy, shaggy, light hair, voice like he'd had a few bits of his throat removed at random."

"Yeah?"

"Who was that?"

"What's it to you?"

Marie rubbed her eyes. "He tried to kill me."

"Oh, so that's what it takes for girls to notice you, is it?!"

"Dude, I have the headache of a lifetime. Just tell me the guy's name."

Kevin huffed. "Peter Slowthorne, but he said the 'Peter' bit in a weird Slavic accent."

"Like 'Pyotr'?"

"Yeah, I guess."

Hope gesticulated passive-aggression in a figure interpretive dance choreographers would envy. "That's the fakest name I've ever heard."

"I'm really sorry, sir. I'm sorry for telling you exactly what he got me to write down, as is my exact profession at this exact institution. You know this place is government funded, right?"

"Yeah, but-"

"So write in to your local seat, and tell them to spend less on refurbishing their parliamentary offices, and start paying me enough to care."

Hope stepped off. "Fair go, fair go. Cheers for your time. We'll be off now."

"So this is the fish and chippie?" Marie asked, after having been led into what could only be described as such, not long after Hope had said that it was exactly where she would take her. It was not a question worth asking, but then again, it was not a place which served boxes of chips worth a $5.50 price tag. And yet...

The place was much like a public swimming pool: all dull blue walls and white tiles and unsettlingly slippery floors and loud children between the ages of six and ten. Even the half-dressed old people and terrible music on worse speakers were accounted for by the beach outside; the only thing conspicuous in its absence was the pungent scent of oversaturated chlorine.
Anything you might want to know about its owner could be extrapolated from the fact that he had modeled it on other similar establishments he recalled from his youth without realising or even caring that his attention to detail in perfecting his insipid interior design, while attracting the best-paying kinds of customers, was a grim signifier of how interesting his life was. Everything you don't want to know about him is equally easy to derive from its name, The Rod and Tackle.

"Sure is. How are you feeling?"

"Still not great."

"Figured. You're doing a good job keeping it together, though."

"How long do I have to keep this up?"

"Until you don't even have to think about it."

"So it's like learning to walk." She slumped her chin on the table, immediately felt how sticky with grease the surface had become in the few short years of its life, and bolted back up. "But that took me, what, a year and a half?"

"Yeah, when you were a bloody infant! When you had a piss-weak baby brain. Now look atcha. not only is your brain more developed, it grows back."

"That's... alright, you're right."

Hope shifted in her seat. "Tell you what. If you'd like to get a better grip on your new abilities, come with me out to my Auntie Ruthy's in the countryside. Her daughter Sarah's birthday's coming up soon, so me and a few others head out there for the weekend. You could be my plus one, if you'd like."

"Uh..." Marie tightened her grip on her power. "Sure. Maybe. Who else is going?"

"Oh, nobody you'd know. The other Sydney community leaders, a couple more from the country, and a couple from Canberra. Most of 'em are pretty nice, unless they've died and been replaced. Ruthy and Sarah are lovely too, even if Sarah's... well, I shouldn't say anything that'd give you the wrong idea."

"What, is there something about her I wouldn't like?"

"What? Oh, no, no, dearie me, no. Suffice to say she was in an accident back in the early eighties and... well, hadn't quite been the same since. Still though! Like I say, lovely woman. Still holding up?"

A cursory glance at the ring on her finger. "Uh, ah, yeah."

"Good. Now, on a more serious note, I wanna be clear that you are to never ever ever use this power deliberately. Alright?"

"If I never have to, it'll be too soon."

"And that thing where you blew your own brains out. None of that, either."

"But-"

"It's really not good for you, you know! It's one of the most emotionally intensive parts of the body to regenerate. Can you remember the rush of it that well?"

"I guess not."

"And what about the feeling of coming back down?"

"I was... trying not to think about that."

"Yeah, exactly. You don't wanna make a habit of that, ay?"

A greasy-faced, wavering-voiced teenage girl indifferently brushed the chips Hope had ordered onto the duo's table before scampering off back behind the counter. Hope turned to her and offered a thumbs up.

"Where were we?"

"Mostly me brooding over how this power feels more like a curse than a blessing."

"Hey. You know, detrimental powers aren't terribly uncommon."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Quite a lot of 'em can be, if you don't know how to switch it off. Zoey knew a girl in high school who made herself immune to pain, but it turned out that extended to emotional pain. She broke down at her mum's funeral when she realised she couldn't mourn."

"Wow."

"Yup."

"I hope that's not your idea of trying to make me feel better."

"No, but the fact that you're still holding it in after I told you that is."

Marie looked down at her ring. It hadn't leaked a bit in all that time. "Daaamn, I'm getting good at this."

"Now," Hope grinned, "let's see if you can keep that going while we get the old grey matter chugging, ay?"

Marie took a deep breath. "Bring it."

"You know the Monty Hall problem?"

"I'm shocked you do."

"Oi! Think what you like about people who look like me at your own risk, mate. You remember who raised me, yeah?"

"Right, right. I'm sorry."

He descended from the rafters at that exact moment, and landed gracefully upon the still-warm chips. His thermoceptive impulses propelled him fifteen centimetres to the rear, wherein he replicated the grace of the first fall. His face could not be more saved if it were Matt Damon in Second-World-War Normandy.

"Aye aye! Speak of the devil, and he will rock up! Coob, you dead dog! D'you make a habit of barging in at the worst of times?"

"It seemed fine to me. Maybe you merely associate me with inappropriate times to intrude."

"Yeah," Marie leaned back in her chair. "Can't imagine why she'd do that."

Kyubey ignored this, simply because it was an uninteresting thing to say. "Hope, is this a lead-in to the two envelopes paradox?"

"Sure is. You know that one, Marie?"

"Uhh... no, I don't. I don't think so, anyway. What is it?"

"Righto. Say you've got two envelopes, each with money in 'em. You don't know how much is in either, but you do know one has twice as much in it as the other."

"...Right."

"Now you're allowed to pick one to keep, but as with Monty Hall, you've got a twist. After you pick one, you can look in it, and then choose to change your answer if you want."

"...Right."

"So you take it, look inside, there's ten bucks. So it follows that the other has gotta have half a chance of giving you twenty, and half of just a fiver. Now, see, that averages out to twelve fifty, which is statistically, therefore, the better choice to make. And because ten bucks is a totally arbitrary example, this works with any amount of money. So you don't need to look in the envelope for switching to be the better choice. You following?"

"...Right. Yes."

"Well then. Let's reinstate the game with a new twist instead of that old one. Let's say, instead of getting to see the one you just picked, you get to take a squiz at the one you didn't. So now, all the logic from before still applies, but which envelope is better swaps around. Therefore, the one you picked the first time is the better pick. Therefore, staying put is the statistically advantageous decision."

"Err..."

"So how is it that both decisions can be better than each other at the same time?"

"I... I-"

"Marie?"

"Well, I, uh-"

"Marie, you're doing the thing again."

A thin trail of darkness bound Marie's gem to Hope's. Urgently, she dispelled it.

"Gah! Why can't I get this right?!"

"I reckon it may be to do with the fact that you're under a lotta stress, and trying to force complete control over a power you didn't even know you had two hours ago."

"You're right."

"And don't I know it!"

"It's just hard to tell myself that it's fine for me to... to need time, to overcome my problems."

"And don't I know it."

"And even if you do find yourself stressed," Kyubey opined, "that's beneficial to every other living thing in the universe, and for that, we thank you."

Marie rolled her eyes. "Alright, smart guy. How about a puzzle for you too, then? Let's say you've got two perfectly-"

"Is this the dollar auction paradox?"

"It might... not be."

"If it's not something novel, I will have heard it before. I didn't think this needed explaining."

"Come ON, man! It's my birthday! Can't I do at least one cool thing today?"

"That's not up to me to decide."

"Fearno?"

Hope looked away from the window. "What? Oh, don't make me answer that question, darl."

"Unbelievable."

Content with her own discontent, Marie took to her chips. They were unpleasant, but not unpleasantly so. She was about one-third of the way through before she had to push them aside.

"I can't eat while people are watching me. It feels weird."

"Nobody's watching you, darl. Who's watching you?"

"I don't know. I..."

She looked around.

"I can't shake the feeling that, you know, I'm being judged."

"What for?"

"I don't know! Maybe, like... I really don't know. Like doesn't it feel a little dishonest, going around in human clothes instead of our outfits?"

"In what sense?"

"Like we're pretending to be people we're not."

Hope nodded for two seconds. "I get what you mean, but I can't agree. Majjo or not, who I am is someone who dresses like this. It's still me, either way."

"I know, I know... no, you're right. But something about who I am feels different in a way that I can't shake the feeling I need to... deal with, in some way or other."

Kyubey chimed in. "I actually have an explanation for that. It's something I wasn't planning on telling you, because it would have turned you off a contract, and I wasn't expecting you to notice anything, let alone feel this bothered by it."

What he told her was simple.

And what he told her was enough to make her lose control of her vampirism for fifty-two seconds.

And what he told her sent her and Hope home, where she sat on the couch for about twenty minutes, completely still.

And what he told her compelled her to stare in the mirror that evening for uncomfortably long periods of time.

And what he told her kept her up at night.

And what he told her was something she wouldn't totally recover from for three days.

And what he told her was this:

A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MAGICAL GIRLS, PART 3

There was no natural selection involved in the dominance of puella furia over their forebears. The survival instinct which allowed them to propagate was not their own.

The dark energy crisis had loomed ever-present over the Concordance since they began harvesting human emotion, which, to this day, necessitates a much harsher contract rate than originally intended. As a result, the energy density of the universe became sustainable for hundreds of billions of years further than otherwise projected. The human race, however, did not. Puella magi could only persist insofar as there were humans whose souls could survive distinction from their bodies, regardless of how much magical potential they might have possessed. With the heightened need for their emotional reserves, eventually every female carrier of the gene which allowed for this distinction was harvested for their soul, some 800 000 years ago.

Ever since, a new method which many find objectionable (as with its predecessor, so would the Concordance, if they had any alternative available), has been employed. If the remaining human population cannot have their souls removed and survive, and the soul must be removed from the body for the manifestation of the soul gem, then it follows that the contractee must, in fact, die. Any components of the spirit which cannot endure this process are, subsequently, to be replaced by cybernetic counterparts. This is the source of much controversy, as many puella furia are uncomfortable with the idea of the person they are being changed on such a basic level. The logical retort to this is that if they are so afraid that, as a result, their choices, personalities and feelings are not their own, then what right do they have to object to the matter in the first place?

This, of course, contradicts arguments we have already seen the Incubator make. However, lacking completely in emotional intelligence, his notions of the matter's nuances are misplaced. How lucky for him, then, that it makes no difference, and he is arguing about identity with adolescents - a demographic roughly as knowledgeable on the subject as small, bathypelagic fish are to the history of 20th-century astrophysics.

In summation, as she is now trying to fathom and will need some time to digest, the Marie Crawford of the first twenty-and-a-half chapters has now been disassembled and refitted with parts that are not her in the heart of everything that determines what 'her' means anyway. She is the shape of a human soul built out of duct tape and anger.

To... indulge, if you will, the sense of irony of our brass-skinned intruder, the girl it addressed has ceased to be, some half-century-plus prematurely.

Let's see, then, what this new girl is capable of in her stead.