"The reason you should go to Las Vegas is because, for only the second time, the second time, ever, they have rebuilt Sodom and Gomorrah." - Lewis Black
Margaret's hot new car spluttered to a stop around the back of a ludicrously lavish Venetian-style complex. Urgently she prodded Alice awake. Alice stirred, glanced out the window, and drew the shield.
"Rise and shine, dumbass. This thing's worth enough that if they could just kill us and take the damn thing, they might."
Despite Alice's fatigue, the two stepped out of the vehicle with well-rehearsed co-ordination.
"Have we got a description of the buyer?"
"She said that wouldn't help."
Alice faltered. "What does that mean?"
"I honestly have no idea."
As if on cue, three identically-dressed showgirls marched out of the back door. The further they stepped into the setting sunlight, the more their similarities became gruesomely apparent - the same hairstyle, the same height, the same build, same gait, every single part of them was exactly the same save, naturally, for their faces. It was an unnerving display to watch. It was inhuman. It was... well, it was show business.
"Ms. McManus?" The woman in the middle smiled.
Margaret nodded. "At your service."
"We're here to collect."
"And the payment?"
"Will be provided by our employer after the evening's festivities."
"Bullshit. You pay up front or you-"
"As thanks for your patience, all facilities of the casino will be on the house until then."
"Give her the shield, Alice."
Alice grumbled and stepped forward, shield in outstretched hands. The girl on the right approached and took it.
"Come, now. I'm sure your journey here has been thirsty work."
The trio led Margaret and Alice indoors, past four more identical women waiting by the door.
"Beginning to see why you told us your description wouldn't help," Margaret whispered.
"Hm? Oh, hahaha. Heavens no, sugar. These gals are all just wax effigies acting as avatars for my will!"
"Uh-"
"Honestly, you wouldn't believe how much easier it is to run the show around here when everything's taken care of by the one person you can count on. C'mon through, ladies. You want food? Drinks? Won't cost you a dime."
The effigy pushed through the backside of a staff-only double door onto the casino floor. The place was a monument to eons of madness and torment, where the most unruly, twisted, and lost of men were sent to venture through a miasma of chaos for hours on end while avaricious scavengers picked them apart, whereupon they would be cast back into the barren wastes outside, mindless, soulless husks of what they had been. So really, it was just a regular, unassuming casino.
For Alice, though, the true Hell of the place was as clear as day. At once, she was assaulted by a wash of saccharine, diatonic cacophony, of hundreds of obnoxious electronic noises reaching in from every second of every corner of the room, suffocating her, until she could feel the ringing from the slot machine two rows down and three to the left in her teeth, the screaming of another five and one on the right in her skin, the beeping of the machine one and six on her left in her blood. Every single machine demanded something of its player, and every single machine demanded to be heard over its fellows, and every single machine found its own nightmare voice to fill the room.
"...Alice? Alice? You good?"
"Sensory overload," she wheezed.
"Oh, come on, dude. Even with my enhanced hearing, I don't-"
Alice took every bit of pain that resounded through her and poured it into Margaret's mind. Margaret fainted for a quarter-second, and slowly eased herself back up.
"Christ! This is what's going through your head right now?"
Alice nodded.
"Yo, ladies! Can you show us to the bar real quick?"
The bar had a much humbler atmosphere, and although neither Alice nor Margaret were old enough to approach it, yet more identical waitresses saw to it that they were well-supplied with in-house burgers, fries, and...
"Soda water in orange juice," Margaret laughed and regarded her glass. "Which one's the mixer? Are they both mixing each other? Crazy shit, dude."
"You know, somehow I'm not sure these are the kinds of questions history's greatest thinkers tend to sit on."
"Sure it is. Can water get wet? Maybe not. Can water wet something which is also wetting it at the same time? There's the question."
"Water has a pH value of 7, so about one in 10,000,000 water molecules are actually dissolved in water, if that helps with your conundrum." Another woman, just as unbearably similar to her contemporaries as the rest save for her two-piece suit and bolo tie, joined the thieves' table.
Margaret looked her up and down. She didn't return the look - she was transfixed on her own likenesses.
"Marvelous things, aren't they? Actors and stagehands so perfect, the fellas who come here don't even realize they're getting lost in the show. You ever see As You Like It?"
Alice shook her head. "Shakespeare, right?"
"Hey! Looks like the girl knows her stuff. Around the end of its second act, there goes a famous few stanzas between the exiled Duke senior and his Lord Jaques. Something to the tune of,"
And one effigy passing by recited, "Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: / This wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants than the scene / Wherein we play in."
"All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: / They have their exits and their entrances;" another followed too quickly to let the beat drop.
"And so forth."
Margaret's ears perked up. "So what does that mean?"
"To me? I dunno, loosen up a little. My whole life is a show, really. So don't give all my vessels looks like I have something to hide. You got any questions? I'm an open book."
Alice led, "Can I ask why they all have different faces?"
"I thought maybe we could ask your name first." Margaret rolled her eyes.
"Both excellent questions. To you, erm..."
"The name's Alice." She extended her hand. The woman didn't take it.
"It's a complicated matter. For all the men who come here ever seem to want, there is a look they're lusting after. All I have to do is give each of these avatars, if you will, the right voice, the right waist, the right hairstyle, and they'll go nuts for it. But the face... well, no two men seem to long for the same face. So I try all sorts, really. Let each of 'em find something to love."
"So it's for the male gaze, then."
"Of course."
"Oh, uh... and if you don't mind me asking, how old are y-"
"And you! What was your question?" The woman retained her unflinching grin while she turned to Margaret.
Margaret waved her down. Some dark instinct deep within her badly wanted to accompany the gesture with a 'nya'. "Margaret, please. I was wanting to know if there was something we could call you."
"Of course! While you're in on the show, I'd like for you to call me by my stage name."
"And that is?"
"Corpus Christie."
"Gee. Humble, isn't she?" Margaret passed along privately.
"I don't get it. Is this a Christian thing?" Alice passed back.
"I can explain in the car." Then, to Christie, "Good to know. So I'm guessing this is the real you, then?"
"Oh! Oh no, not at all. I like to keep that to myself. Well, until tonight. Actually, I'd been thinking it over, and this shield really means an awful lot to me. This is something I've never done before, but I'd like to pay you face to face, in my dressing room."
Alice and Margaret shared a glance. "Wh- what, like, now?"
"When you're ready."
They shared another, then went right back to eating their dinners. Christie didn't move, only looked around at nothing in particular while waiting for them to finish. It was three minutes and thirteen seconds later that they finished eating.
"Wonderful. Shall we go n-"
"Excuse me just a second. Yo, waiter!" Margaret called. "That was great. Could we get another round of that?" She turned to Christie. "Sorry. Go on."
"I think I ought to tell you two that I don't just let anyone backstage like this. But you've been such a great help that I felt the need to thank you personally."
It wasn't the effigy beside them which had spoken. There was another Christie, sitting before a dressing room mirror. Not tending to herself at all, simply transfixed in admiration.
"It's an honor, probably," Margaret nodded.
"Of course! But some people seem to be terribly frightened of true beauty when they see it for the first time."
"Al... right."
Christie - judging by the soul gem ring on her hand, the real Christie - stood up precisely, mechanically. She rubbed her hands together and turned around.
"What do you think?"
Alice recoiled in disgust. Margaret wasn't too far behind.
"It's, um, it's very..."
"Ha! Don't worry. Not everyone gets it at first."
"I'm sure, I just expected you to-"
"Have a face? Yes, that's a perfectly natural assumption. But in the end, it was just holding me back. That's the thing. That's the one thing that divides the people of this world - these fronts we put up when we present ourselves. These disguises." She shrugged. "So I decided, to do away with my own would be the ultimate intimacy, right? The ultimate honesty. And truth is beauty."
"I'm not a fan of this truth," Alice admitted.
"You don't have to be. This is the mathematically perfect appearance. You can't argue I have any imperfect features-"
"Because you don't have any features."
"Exactly!"
"That's not honest at all," Margaret smirked. "In fact, I can't imagine a more performative way of trying to express your philosophy than drastically changing your appearance. Now if you'll excuse us, we're here to take the money and split."
"Yeah," Alice grumbled too quiet for anyone to hear. "Split 80:20, more like."
"Look at the two of you! You, Margaret, a Daughter of Cowardice! And your accomplice, the Pessimist! Both of you threw away your wishes on running from something. I, on the other hand, devoted it to maximizing my potential. So who are you to act like you're better than me?"
Margaret hissed. It was not often that someone managed to pinpoint the rooting of her wish in fear, but there was nothing more infuriating than the assumption that she must be a coward for it. "You call this place 'backstage'? This is more of a show than you were putting on out there. You're so vain, so obsessed with your own appearance, that your own honesty is more fake than anything else."
The effigy which had escorted her in lifted her by the throat.
"And you think you're any different? Nobody ends up with a reputation like yours without deliberately cultivating it."
Tremendous pain overtook Margaret's head, worsening as its oxygen intake thinned, and thinned, and thinned... and still, she found the strength to roll her eyes. "And who were you before you became Corpus Christie?"
The wax around her neck softened.
"You don't remember, do you?"
Christie rubbed her temple. Her effigy let go of Margaret, and hardly seemed to notice. It went without remarking upon that Margaret landed on her feet.
"Not even a name?"
"It's... hardly any business of yours."
Margaret stared her down. "Maybe you should be spending more on some kind of psychiatrist, then, and not on breaking into some billionaire's house. Forget your histrionics, I don't appreciate clients taking out their issues on me. Alice?"
"We'll be calling the trade off now," Alice finished.
"And her kneecaps?"
"Of course."
"Should be about eye level with you."
"Shut the f-"
Christie raised the voice it was hard to say her vacant mouth really had. "Don't think I'm some pushover just because I make myself out to be some overtly feminine show-pony for a bunch of gullible men too detached from reality for their wallets' sake. I hold all the power here. Was it those men who invented the computer, isolated radium, flew the Pacific?! No, it wasn't!"
"Actually," Alice piped up, "men had flown the Pacific before Earhart. She didn't even finish it, that's where she went missing."
"...Oh. Do you think she's going to come back and wrap it up soon? She must be getting pretty old by now."
"That's not... Whatever. Sure. Possibly."
Margaret fired off her rifle into the ceiling. Between her floor and the next, it struck the heart of a large vesper bat which had settled down in the drywall. This bat had developed a deadly, highly contagious disease only hours before which, left unchecked, would eradicate its entire species. And yet, no remaining specimen of its ilk would ever know of how Margaret had inadvertently saved them from extinction, and none of them would ever get to thank her.
"Can we get back on topic, for God's sake?" Her demand was not directed at myself, but the reminder is appreciated. "The entire time my companion and I have been here, you have done nothing but push us around, waste our time, and now manhandle me. You've made your point - you don't give a shit about the value of our work, so now you're going to give us that shield, and we're going to take it back and sell it to someone who does."
"It's too late to call off the trade, I'm afraid. The shield is already being put into place." Christie composed herself and clasped her hands together.
"The trade's not over until the money's in our hands."
"In place for what?" Alice tried.
"You agreed to wait until after the festivities for that."
"That's not how this works, ma'am!"
"In place for what?!" Alice retried.
"What?" Margaret snapped.
"What's she using the shield for?"
Christie laughed, heartily. Demoralizingly heartily. "You don't know what it's capable of, do you?"
"Well, it seems to be virtually indestructible, from what we can tell."
"Really?" Margaret privately conferred.
"Yeah. Holly hit it full force and it didn't leave a scratch, or make a sound."
"Exactly. Exactly. Exactly! Nothing you throw at it can damage it. Anything you try to hit it with, the force will just pass through. Every blow, every strike, every shot, physical or magical. The shield ignores them all the same. But that also makes it the perfect conductor."
"For... what?"
"Anything." Christie sat back down, pulled up an empty glass, put it to her head as if drinking. "Now you'd better go catch me before it's too late."
"Wait, why are you telling us this? What kind of gloating evil plan bullshit is this?" Margaret waved her hands in the air.
"Don't you get it yet? I'm in this for the grandeur, the spectacle, the drama. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to etch my magnificence into this corner of the fabric of reality in... oh, I don't know. Six minutes and eighteen seconds? That sounds good to me. In a little over six minutes, everyone in this building dies."
With that, she clapped once, and vanished in a flash of light.
Ibiza Shittsley found himself in the middle of a coniferous forest. It was quiet - relaxing, even, despite the urgency with which his teleportation had to be rectified. The time between jumps was down to... he estimated about three or four hours.
He considered spending the next three or four hours wandering around, enjoying the birdsong and the chirping of insects, cooling off from the energy burst of the last jump in the early afternoon chill of... where was this? The movement of the Sun and the strength of the Earth's magnetic field at this point suggested somewhere around the Arctic circle, perhaps just a little further south. That was interesting. He would have imagined that at this point each teleport would be so immense he shouldn't even be anywhere near Earth. Then again, this was the universe's largest source of emotional energy. Could it be he was bound to it by magic, much as something could be by gravity or magnetism?
He started walking - in any direction, really - and tried to calculate the rate at which his teleportation was worsening. At this point, the force behind them should be pushing against the Earth's magic field. After all, to get this far around the surface of the Earth, he needed to be moving in three dimensions. There was no reason to believe he couldn't be going up or down if untethered by emotional energy. But he should be moving so quickly and so far against these forces now that each jump should bring with it immense quantities of heat, more than he was feeling. Where was that heat going? Was it going anywhere, or was he, in fact, jumping along stranger dimensions than the few he could see?
He came to a road while trying to remember the formula for dark magic. He should have known the conversion rate between Joules and Holzknechts by heart, but he had the most dreadful headache right now, and couldn't recall an exact value. Still, though, a road was a good sign. He stepped up to it, and stuck out his thumb.
The road was also quiet. That was good, it gave him time to think.
Forty minutes later, when a dull blue Hillman Hunter came into view, he couldn't help but notice that he'd gotten no further than he'd begun, and wouldn't until he could write his thoughts down somewhere. The car slowed to a crawl, and the window wound down to reveal a middle-aged man with an unkempt mop of black hair, bulging eyes, and a tight-set smile.
"Do you need a lift?" the man said. In Finnish, to Ibiza's confusion. Mentally, he began rebuilding the equation in his head with a more precise guess as to where he was. There was no doubt in his mind now that he was bound to Earth. So where was that excess energy going? For all he knew he could have begun to breach some kind of wall to hypothetical parallel universes.
"Yes! Thank you!" Ibiza replied, which was more of a "kyllä kiitos". He was starting to get the hang of distinguishing voiced and unvoiced consonants. This pleased him. "I've been hitchhiking for so long, I think I'm lost. What's the nearest town?"
"Pudasjärvi. It's about twenty minutes from here."
"Oh, lovely! Could I get a ride?"
"Sure, no problem! I'm Taavi, by the way. You are?"
"Bytch, with a y," the humanoid formerly known as Ibiza improvised.
Bytch climbed into the passenger seat, wound up the window, and as the car began to move again, immediately got to work jotting down his ideas so far on the fogged-up glass. The alternate universe possibility seemed the most likely.
"What universe is this?" he asked Taavi.
"Hm?"
"The universe we're in now."
Taavi shrugged. "I don't know. It's just the universe. I don't think it has a name."
Bytch furrowed his brow. "I'm not sure if anyone has the authority to give it a name. Maybe we haven't been taking such good care of it."
"Nobody's looking after it?"
"Not in the sense of acting as its custodian, to my knowledge."
"I could do it, if you wanted."
"Look after the universe?" Bytch sat up. "Are you sure? That's a big ask."
"I have plenty of free time. I'm a lumberjack, see, but my sons are much stronger than me and are doing a great job in my stead. How hard can it be?"
"No idea. Nobody's ever done it before. Uh, but I wouldn't complain if you took that role."
"I suppose I'll figure it out as I go, then," nodded Taavi, Owner of the Universe.
Bytch went back to his equation.
"What's that you're writing?"
"Trying to figure out how to stop myself from being torn apart by tremendous quanta of energy."
"That sounds simple enough. Every day, I am not torn apart by tremendous quanta of energy, and most days, I'm not even trying."
"See, it sounds easy when you put it like that, but I'm being jostled about at possibly post-relativistic, and certainly worsening speeds, at shortening intervals."
"Is that even possible?"
"No, not at all. That's why it's such a problem."
Taavi, Owner of the Universe thought it over. "So suppose you look at your situation from an external frame of reference. From that perspective, might you be said to have negative mass? Perhaps then, having a counterforce act on you might actually reverse the acceleration of these forces."
"Obviously. How else am I going to- wait, I thought you were a lumberjack. How do you know all that?"
"Never underestimate a working class man."
"Good point. I'm sorry." Bytch scratched his chin. "Hang on. If the function of mass dilation does become asymptotal beyond light speed, the same would be true of time dilation. What year is it?"
"1987. Why?"
"Yes! I was right!" Bytch cheered, and then, "oh God no, I was right!"
"It'll be alright," Taavi, Owner of the Universe asserted, and put a hand on Bytch's shoulder. "If you take into account the same force acting twice on an object with a positive and negative mass, that should cancel to zero, yes? If you know that, then it should just be a matter of harnessing the direction of these forces."
"You're right. That is a start - although I'd also have to try making the magnitude of the force consistent over time, otherwise no two will ever add up to exactly zero. But to do that, I need to force myself to use so much energy in a single jump that it would be physically impossible to use any more in the next one. Once I'm up at the maximum, it couldn't possibly get any worse."
"Ah, so it's a waiting game!"
"Well... no. When that happens, my body is going to hit one hundred and forty-two nonillion Celcius and the laws of physics are going to break down."
"Oh."
The two drove in silence for about half a minute.
"Is it possible to reduce that maximum energy level down to something safer?" Taavi, Owner of the Universe waved a hand to clarify he was just 'putting that out there'.
"Not without changing the gravitational constant or the speed of light. At that point, I might as well be trying to carve out the fabric of spacetime."
More scribbling on the frost of the window.
"Hang on, there's an idea..."
"Is that possible?"
"Theoretically. But if it is, even Concordance technology - alien, don't worry about it, once we're in Pudasjärvi, I'll..."
"You'll what?"
"No, nothing. Men In Black doesn't come out for another ten years. Where was I? Right! Concordance technology is centuries away from being able to do it, but if I go back in time, and compel them to research it, then forward a few centuries... oh, this is brilliant!"
The cosmic guardian drummed his steering wheel and laughed with glee. "Fantastic! Did you solve it?"
"Yes! One small problem, though - all members of the Concordance are obligated to kill me on sight, and they have nothing to gain from looking into this kind of technology."
"Well, boys! The night is young!"
The crowd cheered. Christie curtsied.
"I'd like to dedicate this one to a kindred spirit, who I'm meeting for the first time tonight." She winked at nobody in particular, but four or so men took themselves to be her intended target. Little did it matter; they would all be dead in six minutes and eighteen seconds.
A small brass band - naturally consisting entirely of her - soulfully swelled into the periphery of the stage. Margaret and Alice burst out of the dressing room and into the corridor one floor directly above them. Much like the rest of the building, it was designed to simulate the illusion of daylight around the clock, it was horrendously ugly (with the walls done up to look like a Venetian street, and the ceiling papered over with a blue sky) and, most disastrously of all at a time like this, it looked the same as every other corridor.
The streets were deserted,
Though the police were alerted:
They considered the phone call a hoax
Furtively glancing,
Then jauntily prancing
The youth caught the guards unaware
"Can you sense her, or something?" Margaret urged.
"Not from here. It's like she just up and ceased to be."
"She can do that?"
"If she's so obsessed with honesty and façades, it wouldn't surprise me. Oh. Oh! I can see through her now! She's... channeling something, I think."
"Which way?"
Slipping between them,
He ought to have seen them
The eyes and their owner so near
With torch shining bright
He strode on in the night
Till he came to the room with the safe
Margaret was down the corridor like a shot, then up the wall, then from one to the other around the corner at the end. Alice sprinted along beside her, indicating Christie's location with sharp, sweeping gestures.
"Woah! Hold on, that's-"
"What happened?" Margaret slowed a pace.
"She's gone again. It's like she can only hide when she's not focusing her magic on something else. Or maybe when she does, it's too loud to cover up, I don't know."
"You don't think she might have just vanished like before, and taken the shield with her?"
"If she has, she could have just put it in a place where we can't get to it anyway. I think we should stick to our current route."
Margaret grinned. "I knew I kept you around for something."
"Your business needed a charismatic one."
"Hello son, I hope you're having fun!"
"You've got it all wrong, sir! I'm only the cleaner!"
With that he fired, the other saying as he died:
"You've done me wrong", it's the same old song
Forever
Forever...
Two Christies, each armed with a rapier, stood guard down the next corridor. They spotted the thieves immediately and assumed a position as flamboyant as it was (presumably) defensively sound.
"Well, that's about as encouraging a sign as any that we're going the right way," Margaret shrugged.
"Disarm them."
"What?"
"Only the original Christie has a soul gem. The effigies can't manifest their swords away from her."
If Margaret were a fractionally better employer, she would have commended Alice's brilliance for that. But they both knew this, and nothing needed to be said.
Alice fanned out a low sweep of her knives, which proved easy enough for the guards to avoid, but a distraction enough for a sniper bullet to tear through the shoulder of one in a burst of wax. As she scrambled for the blade in her amputated hand - a grip nigh-impossible to pry open now that it was reduced to lifeless, hardened wax - her assailants tackled her fellow together, and then her, and pinned them both to the wall with their own rapiers.
Robbery, assault and battery - the felon and his felony
Robbery, assault and battery - the felon and his felony
Margaret and Alice scrambled onward, to a stairwell coiled around an elevator shaft. Alice nodded upward, and they ascended just as the elevator unleashed six more Christies behind them.
"I can feel her again, but who knows for how long."
He picked up the diamonds
And bundles of fivers
He pushed them well down in his sack
But the alarm had been sounded -
He was completely surrounded!
But he had some more tricks up his sleeve
"This floor?"
"I wish." Alice poked a thumb at four more swordswomen descending from the opposite stairwell. Margaret readied her rifle, but the other six quickly stormed in behind them.
"Not sure I can rattle off ten clean shots while I'm being assailed by as many rapiers. You think you can take this?"
"No," Alice admitted, but had very little in way of a choice.
She threw for the pressure points on impulse, but automata of wax took blows to any point the same way. Three behind and one in front slowed, but still advanced. Margaret ran at the three ahead, blasting open the chest of one and making use of how little one can truly expect the sensation of having one's chest blown open to throw the shocked effigy into a fellow. She pushed past and...
"Come outside with your hands held high!"
"You'll not get me alive, sir, I promise you that, sir!"
With that he fired, the other saying as he died
"You've done me wrong", it's the same old song
Forever
Forever...
"Wait!"
Margaret turned around. Most of the surviving guards were horrifically torn up and had taken to wallowing in the loss of their beauty, softening, trying to restore themselves, failing... but one had pinned a barely-conscious Alice to the ground and placed her blade against her throat.
"Go on, your shield is almost within reach. You can either take it and be done with this, or you can try to save your friend. But let's not kid ourselves... you really are just like me. I'll be sure to let her know she's dead meat when she comes to."
"You think I can't take you."
"Ha! Alright. Either way, you've got... four minutes and eight seconds."
Robbery, assault and battery - the felon and his felony
Robbery, assault and battery - the felon and his felony
Christine pressed her rapier nearly close enough to draw blood. Margaret struggled to contain herself.
"I get what you mean when you say I'm just like you, but I just about reckon one of us must've taken a wrong turn somewhere," she drawled, a deep, Southern drawl, "Because, y'see, there is a difference between us. I'm gonna live to see tomorrow, and you ain't."
Christie cackled. "I knew your accent was fake."
Idly, Margaret reloaded her rifle. "I could say the same about your hair extensions, sugar, but I'm nice enough not to."
She fired straight into Alice's left deltoid. Alice snapped awake screaming, howling in pain. Somewhere, a floor above, the Christine of flesh and blood felt the pain forced into her head. She fell, clutching her own shoulder. She struggled to maintain the band three floors down, at the expense of her guards. They followed her suit. The one standing over Alice retreated just enough for her to slip away.
"Don't ever do that again," she groaned.
Margaret took her hand and dragged her upstairs. She faltered a second, while the spirit of California took to roaming her voice once more. "Save your life? You got it."
"And you're Southern? Why didn't you say so?"
"Some people act weird if they know you're from a red state."
"I don't think there's anything wrong with that."
"Heh. Thanks."
"You are absolutely fucked for other reasons, though."
Margaret found no time to retort. The corridor they stepped out onto had about a dozen quickly-recovering Christies in both directions.
"Don't tell me this is the floor."
"Alright, I won't."
"Any plan here?"
"Only while they're all bunched together like this. She's to the left."
Alice threw her arms wide, and threw waves of knives into the left squadron, tearing at and flaying their forms. But more than that, as they softened to repair, their bodies began to cling to one another, losing coloration, losing shape, finding themselves turned into an unwieldy twenty-four legged beast with swords sporadically stuck into them. Sneaking past them in that state was no trouble at all.
"He's leaving via the roof!"
"The bastard's got away!"
"God always fights
On the side
Of the bad man
Bad man
Bad man
Bad man..."
"You're pretty good at this," Margaret admitted, at long last.
"And you'd genuinely be dying right now if I hadn't done that. What's it gonna take to get some respect from you?"
"I dunno. Can we talk about this when we don't have, like, two minutes to live?"
"Fine. She's in... dammit, lost her again."
"Now?"
The corridor shook. A flash of light from beneath a door three down burned itself into their retinas.
"Then again, maybe she won't be that hard to find."
Margaret kicked the door down. Christie stood perfectly still and silent in the center of the room, holding the shield up in front of her face. Or - wait, this was an effigy which also happened to be faceless. The real her was standing before a full-length mirror, glass of water in hand, panting and reciting affirmations to herself. She turned around.
"Margaret. Alice. You're just in time."
Margaret shot at her the moment she was in the room. The bullet pierced her chest. Blood spurted out, thick, dark, and annoyingly elegant.
"Yes, yes. Nice try, and all that. But my gem is already in the effigy. Where? I'm not telling, but you're not going to find it in one minute and twenty-four seconds."
I've got clean away
But I'll be back some day
Just the combination will have changed
Some day they'll catch me
To a chain they'll attach me
Until that day I'll ride the old crime wave
"Thanks for the shield, by the way. By its very design, it makes for the perfect refractory lens of magical energies. I have tried channeling through glass lenses before, but..."
She sang an operatic pitch. Again, the room shook, and now a brilliant light struck the glass in her hand. It resonated, rang faintly, crescendoed, then shattered.
Margaret ignored her and grabbed the shield, but the vessel, now apparently empty, held it too tight to wrest free.
"Alice, you weirdo. Don't just stand there. Come cut this thing's arms off."
"I'm afraid I can't allow that," Christie growled, and uppercut Margaret. She stumbled back and righted herself against the wall. Alice lunged at Christie from behind, a dagger in each hand, but she turned and jabbed her in the stomach.
"What, you didn't expect me to put up a fight without my rapiers?"
Margaret sneered.
"Oh well. It wasn't really a fight anyway. At the risk of breaking kayfabe, you were never supposed to win this one. Now if you don't mind, this show needs a grand finale."
If they try to hold me for trial
Then I'll stay out of jail by paying my bail
And after I'll go to the court of appeal saying
"You've done me wrong", it's the same old song
Forever
Forever...
Christie stood before her doppelgänger, raised her arms, and returned to her operatic pitch. The room shook yet again. Margaret and Alice could each feel that it would be for the last time.
The beam struck the shield, and then began to pass through it, focused into the head of the sculpture. Slowly it began to move, radiating power unlike its fellows, come to true life. The absence of face was more than a vain resemblance to the hyperfigurement of its creator - rather, the golem of Prague and the Shabti of Egypt were duty-bound by the shape of a word upon them, a deliberate definition. This statue was more akin to the designs of Adam and Lilith.
Done me wrong, same old song, forever
Done me wrong, same old song, forever
Its head bulged and leaked constant streams of noise. It lifted into the air and spread its arms. Light of colors never named cascaded down from its body. Instinctively Alice and Margaret clung to each other as the white-hot rays poured out and over them, through their flesh and bones, through the walls and the floor, and then...
Done me wrong, same old song, forever
Done me wrong, same ol-
AMELIA EARHART
Amelia M. Earhart (born 1897) is an American aviator, Terran representative, and volunteer for the Concordance's off-Earth experiments on magical girls. If, for whatever reason, one were to disregard the consequences of time dilation, then not only would that be a sign of one's own questionable life choices, but it would also make Earhart the single oldest living magical girl, for a certain definition of living.
Her most well-known achievement, of course, needs no mention. The experiments which led to the development of the zero-gravity emotional capacitor revolutionized the past fifty years of Concordance technology, and could extend the universe's life by twenty million years. Her best-known achievement on her home soil, however, is being the first woman to fly the Atlantic Ocean on her own, which didn't extend the universe's life by any years.
It was five years after that flight that she took to circumnavigating the planet. This endeavor was never fully realized, though, as during the trans-Pacific final leg of the journey, her soul gem suddenly gave out, the phase change producing enough energy to overwhelm all radio transmission, and the metamorphic paralysis keeping her from flying the plane. But of course, she survived - her experiences with aviation, and by extension, changes in weight, were unique among magical girls at the time, and therefore, she was the perfect subject for testing in an off-world environment. Though her plane and body were lost in the wreckage, her gem was recovered by the Incubator, and has been kept stable ever since (although, as mentioned before, the powers of her and her eight hundred and sixty-three fellows has diminished away from Earth).
UNDERSTUDY: We're being called again.
NARRATOR: Hm?
UNDERSTUDY: There's some guy here I don't recognize, asking us to meet with their boss, I think? I'm not sure.
NARRATOR: Oh! Mother Superior! Tell them I'll be right there.
UNDERSTUDY: Of course.
NARRATOR: And try to ask if we can stop getting pulled away every time I write about someone who went missing on a plane.