"All his life he sincerely believed that in certain spheres he was a constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was watched and noted, and that each one of the three governors who succeeded one another during twenty years in our province came with special and uneasy ideas concerning him, which had, by higher powers, been impressed upon each before everything else, on receiving the appointment. Had anyone assured the honest man on the most irrefutable grounds that he had nothing to be afraid of, he would certainly have been offended." - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Margaret woke to only vague pentimenti of the room where she had passed out. The shape of the place was much the same as it had been, although the marked absence of Alice and the effigy unnerved her for two different reasons. More than that, the deceased corpus of Christie on the floor before her. More still, the fact that everything in the room was utterly and completely on fire.
"Alice?" she yelled, although the density of the smoke lingering above her left her thinking twice before trying again.
"Oh hey! You're awake!" poured into her mind, although from how far away, she couldn't say. "I did try to wake you up, but I wasn't exactly planning on letting Narcissus's reflection over here get away out of check."
"That thing's up and about?"
"Not if I can do anything about it."
Alice lunged at the back of Christie's neck, a dagger in each fist. Without looking back, she swatted her with a waxy backhand obliquely into the wall. For good measure, she cast a rapier into the hem of Alice's cloak and pinned her there. All the while she slowed not a pace, only carried on.
"That said, if you could get here and help as soon as you can, that would be fantastic."
"Sure thing. I'll make like you and be there shortly."
Alice wrested the blade from the wall and watched it dissipate. "I'd hope that's not the best short joke of the night, but up there, you're only going to be taking in more smoke the longer we stick around."
Margaret groaned and eased herself out of the door. "Which way did you two scamper off down and leave me to burn?"
"You're going to have to come back to the stairwell and head the opposite direction. Watch out for the twenty sculptures' worth of burning wax on the ground."
"It's collapsed."
"What?"
"The corridor. Down that way, it's caved in."
Silence. Save, of course, for the deafening roar of flames. Save for that, there was silence.
"Alice?"
"I'm thinking, alright? I don't know. Get outside and stop her while I try to chase her out. There's probably a fire exit somewhere."
A few seconds of mad scrambling uncovered one quickly enough, which, although Margaret didn't care to check, was the only one in the building. Christie's ritual had always been intended to kill everyone in the building save for her, who would meanwhile be in this particular corner of the building as she had been minutes ago, free to leave as she pleased. If she had known this, however, she might have considered it odd that it also led upward, and thought twice about seeking a vantage point from there. But as it stood, she saw two possibilities: either the roof would collapse and kill Christie while she was inside, in which case Margaret could leave to safety with the satisfaction of a job well done, or it would hold firm long enough to give her time to bear down on her gracious host.
She shifted her weight out the window and clung to the metal railing. It burned her palm. She could tell this was going to be a long climb.
The following text has been recorded by the Understudy to the Narrator. Consent is hereafter assumed from all parties involved. In compliance with the Narrator's own operating standards, the names of all individuals have been surgically removed for their health.
Transcript begins.
The Narrator and I exit her labyrinth-apartment.
NARRATOR: To think we'd be allowed conference with our master so suddenly, much less have it demanded of us.
UNDERSTUDY: I take it this is a big deal, then.
NARRATOR: Inconceivably so. Who summoned us?
THELETOS: That would be me.
NARRATOR: I thought my Understudy had said she didn't recognize you.
UNDERSTUDY: I don't.
NARRATOR: But Theletos brought you into this world. How can you not know him?
UNDERSTUDY: Well, I was unconscious at the time.
NARRATOR: You were unconscious during your own apotheosis?
UNDERSTUDY: Probably, but I can't say for sure. I slept through the part where I was unconscious.
The apparently-named Theletos laughs, nearly silently.
THELETOS: I can't blame her. She had been through quite a lot.
NARRATOR: Oh?
THELETOS: But I'm not supposed to talk about history as long as you have a responsibility to write it.
NARRATOR: If... you say so.
UNDERSTUDY: So are you supposed to lead us to...?
THELETOS: Hm?
NARRATOR: Mother Superior.
THELETOS: Of course! Although... I can only point you in her direction. Her presence is too strong for me to withstand.
NARRATOR: Is that so? I presumed you were two parts of the same entity.
THELETOS: I think you could say that about your fingers and your eyes, but still find it hard to think about digging one into the other.
Transcript intermits because I was distracted by this mental image. Sorry :(
- The Understudy
Kim-Wan escorted Wai-Fong and the Professor into a back alley populated by all manner of cheap, hole-in-the-wall cuisine. Wai-Fong had been here many times herself as something of a community leader for the girls of the city below the poverty line, a class far more people were openly a part of now that the Attendants of the Deep Light had been forcefully disbanded city-wide.
"So this is the last place anyone saw her?"
"Yes, sir. As evidenced by her body being found right here just an hour ago."
Clearly it hadn't moved since.
"I thought you said she'd gone missing." Wai-Fong leaned over the body and scratched her chin.
"Yes, sir, that's correct. Her soul gem was never recovered."
"Oh, goodness. That's new, isn't it? Usually the whole gamut just vanishes."
"I'm afraid not, sir, but as far as I'm aware, it's the only disappearance to leave the body behind intact."
"And you found her here?"
"That's right."
"Did nobody step in to protect her?" Professor Chang tried. "I'm sure, at least, there must have been witnesses in a place like this."
"Sure were," a young woman sitting on a bench behind her called out. "Three men, real buff types, packing enough heat to make anyone think twice before trying to remember them in more detail than that."
Professor Chang turned around and marched over. "Military?"
"Like I say, ma'am. I don't know anything. I don't want to know anything. I don't want you to want to know anything, either."
She sighed, considered trying further, unconsidered it, and walked back to the others.
"Do we know who the victim was?"
"She was, and with any luck still is, Cheung Lai-Man," Kim-Wan explained, "fifteen years of age, N.F.A., cryomancer. She'd been couch-surfing with a few friends, and one of them reported her missing.
Not too long after, word gets around about... well, look at her."
"Only fifteen..." the Professor mumbled.
"Right? Practically a pensioner by our measure. Any thoughts?"
"Well," Wai-Fong shrugged. "I don't think Titania or Parhelion still exist in any form. I just don't think you can keep that secret from even the Incubator for a decade. But I think they probably... I don't know, discovered or developed something someone out there would kill to keep secret."
"Why disappearance, then? Why not just kill anyone who knows too much? Especially now, when they've more or less created the illusion of that much to a layperson anyway."
"I don't know, kid. I really don't know. What do you think?"
"I'll be honest, sir. I have absolutely no explanation. None of this makes any sense."
"Any sign she knew what was coming?"
"Good question. Lemme check." She knelt and put a hand on the body's temple.
"What's she doing?" Professor Chang whispered.
"She's a healer, but better than most. Though she can't bring the dead back, she can still channel her power into inanimate tissue."
"I'm better than that, too," Kim-Wan smirked. "Somewhere out there, this is having a healing effect on her gem, too. No matter how far away it is. Kyubey can probably track that, although trying this with other bodies has had... hm, limited success. Not complete failure, whatever Ms. Yuen tells you." She stood up. "Oh that note, it looks like her heartbeat was really gunning it in her last moments. And yet, no sign of ice. Looks like she knew she couldn't take those guys on. What do you make of that?"
"I dunno, that just doesn't seem feasible. Three humans is nothing. Ah, present company excluded, Professor!"
"No, it's fine. You're correct. You were saying?"
"Yes! Of course. I was going to say there has to be some other kind of explanation. Something we're missing."
Kin-Wan shrugged. "Maybe you're right. One thing's for sure, though."
"Yes?"
"She's heavy. You're going to have to carry her."
UNDERSTUDY: And I'm imagining you call her Mother Superior to drop a pun at the big reveal.
NARRATOR: What pun? There's no pun.
The Narrator opens a portal, just like she had on her tour of Pleroma. This one leads directly to the field of thrones.
UNDERSTUDY: The Abbess is the Abyss.
NARRATOR: Okay. Guilty as charged.
We step through. The Editor's absence probably suggests this isn't where we last came in, but the black sun is still there. I don't think it moves.
UNDERSTUDY: Is she here?
NARRATOR: This way.
UNDERSTUDY: Is she near the black sun?
NARRATOR: Haha, yes. "Near".
As we wander in that direction, the thrones begin to look like more and more primitive chairs, and the sun only gets closer. Eventually they stop looking like chairs and more like pure mathematical randomness trying to learn what a chair is by trial and error. Beyond that, they just stop.
NARRATOR: Nervous?
UNDERSTUDY: A little.
NARRATOR: Let's cut to someone in a significantly more stressful situation. Then we won't feel so bad about our own.
A heady scent pinched Bytch's nose and slapped him lightly around the cheeks. He stirred. He didn't even know he'd been unconscious, but he did remember the last jump really pushing him to his limit.
"Where... am I?"
Roughly five (and he was at a degree of consciousness where the property of fiveness only existed as approximation) magical girls orbited his position with him in the sights of various weaponry he doubted he was in any health to swat. A (rough) sixth slouched nigh-laterally across a heap of bricks piled into a charitably nonspecific description of a throne.
His question was answered by all of this seeming to take place in a grassy plain out the back of a small row of houses. He recognized it. Worse, he recognized the girls.
"He wakes," one of the girls - Cihuaton, he believed, unless he was dizzier than he thought and looking at the wrong person entirely - announced.
"Thank you. I can see that." The girl in the throne sat up, crossed her legs, sipped from a cup resting on its arm. "Who are you, lad? What's your intention?"
"What's that you've got there?" He pointed at her cup.
"Hey! Hey! I ask the questions!"
"Right! Right. Sorry. I don't know, and not exploding, respectively."
"Are you having a laugh?"
"I'm pretty close to having a cry, if that counts. Is that pulque?"
"What's it to you?"
"You're a bit young to be drinking, aren't you? Sorry, it's just that's a recipe I haven't seen much of in 150 years. Oh, I'm way out."
"Way out? Way out of line, I'm sure. Someone hit him. Anyone will do."
And anyone did do, across the back of his head. He cried out and clutched at his crown. "Sorry. I'm sorry, there's a lot I want to say... a lot I have to get straight. I missed you guys. You've all been dead for five and a half centuries."
"I for one haven't seen this guy before," one of the younger girls - Teiuc, if memory served - admitted. Each of her fellows in turn agreed. "It's getting late. Can I go home now?"
Her superior rolled her eyes. "You're certainly not doing much for the element of intimidation when you say that sort of thing. Whatever. Beat it."
She did just that. The remainder silently agreed to wait until she was gone to proceed.
Bytch tried again, "Please believe me. I'm lost, I'm in hot water, and I'm a long way from home. I've had a hell of... shit, less than a month. Please, just leave me to it."
"Elaborate." His captor resumed her slump.
"Yes, this is a curious situation," admitted a small, elegant flow of movement catching the last of the sun's light graciously upon his lace-white pelage. The golden rings around his auricular extremities hummed softly in the breeze. "We're interested to hear how it could come to pass that a magical girl-"
Girl? Bytch thought. Well, she supposed that particular augmentations made to her soul would imply as much. Fair enough, she supposed.
"-could appear ex nihilo, purportedly from the future, equipped with Concordance-technology-based augmentations which don't exist yet."
Bytch could feel herself grow hot with every passing second. She ignored it, because there was nothing to be done about that, but one primitive part of her mind could not help but fret to no rational end over matters she couldn't control. That part was taking up more cognitive ability with every degree she rose.
"I...! I, ah..."
Was she sweating?
"Look, guys. Just don't worry about it."
"I'm not worrying." The Incubator lopped his head aside.
"Oh... oh, no, I remember this part. I saw this before, at the, at the time. Iuitl... tell your friends to get back."
The girl holding her prisoner bolted upright. "How does he know my name?"
"Please just...!"
Sparks sprung from her, onto the grass. Her captors stamped out what they could before it caught, but did well to maintain their distance.
"And you! Incubator! Get this down:"
"I'm sorry, but my first priority is evacuation in your current state."
"Just listen, and thank me later! This is important! This is the most crucial thing you'll ever do in your whole ten-million year life!" She struggled now over the din of her very flesh igniting, her skin glowing, her bones roaring. "In the year 1991 C.E., you have to prevent the birth of a girl named M-"
She never had the chance to say the name, and having seen the ordeal from a distance some centuries prior, she had dreaded as much. At once, her every molecule accelerated and tore itself apart. A wave of heat and light and sound assumed her position and the place where she had just stood was now a tremendous ball of flame, ascending - to where? It didn't matter. Every trace of the woman of many names was gone, entirely, from all of time and space. No longer a part of the universal whole.
The fireball hushed the girls into reverence and awe, and how could it not? It was the final moment of the most powerful entity in the cosmos. It was enough to push through time itself. It was beautiful, and impossible, and in some regard, profoundly tragic.
From the light and shadow emerged a new figure, tall, muscular, and clad in hummingbird armour, face blue with copper and black with blood. He regarded the flame silently, considerately.
He was Huītzilōpōchtli, bird of the south, and the last of the sun gods. And he declared:
"Yeah, it's alright. I've seen better."
"Excuse me?" Someone was heard to have asked.
"Oh! Make no mistake. For a mortal, it's definitely a pretty good one. It's just... well, I wouldn't be rushing to make offerings to it or anything if I were you lot. Six out of ten."
UNDERSTUDY: Hold up. So the Aztec gods are real, then?
NARRATOR: Well, I'm not sure if they still are. The practices and rituals which by and large sustained them were pretty much stopped for hundreds of years.
UNDERSTUDY: But they did exist, right? They'd figured out that their religion was right?
NARRATOR: I think you've got that backwards. Did you think nothing came of the way magic channels emotion and conviction into shapes of reality? Those rites and practices, that culture, that brings the realm of those gods closer to the real, tangible world.
UNDERSTUDY: So every religion is right, then.
NARRATOR: I think you're oversimplifying it.
She hesitates to add,
NARRATOR: But not by very much.
UNDERSTUDY: Even the ones that conflict?
NARRATOR: Of course! That's irony!
UNDERSTUDY: Is this the afterlife, then? Am I dead?
NARRATOR: Not quite. Think of this as more like a plane of enlightenment. Nirvana, or something.
UNDERSTUDY: Oh, neat. I like that one song. Lithium, I think it is.
NARRATOR: What?
UNDERSTUDY: It's a joke. You know, Kurt Cobain's band.
NARRATOR: Kurt Cobain was in a band?!
UNDERSTUDY: How do you know him, then?
NARRATOR: For his sound collage work. Weird stuff happens when you line up every cut of his Montage of Heck and listen to it at the right pitch. He hid stuff in there. That's why the government had to have him executed.
UNDERSTUDY: I thought we were done with this conspiracy garbage.
NARRATOR: You and the Editor are each too hasty to brand me as a conspiracy theorist.
UNDERSTUDY: Alright, Agent Mulder. Explain the Lead Masks Case.
NARRATOR: An extremely specific fetish gone wrong.
UNDERSTUDY: The Dyatlov Pass Incident.
NARRATOR: Largely aliens. Except for Dubinina, who was killed by the Chuchunya in an unrelated incident.
UNDERSTUDY: The filming of the moon landing.
NARRATOR: Performed by a different crew a week beforehand just in case Armstrong and Aldrin couldn't pull it off.
UNDERSTUDY: The Loch Ness Monster?
NARRATOR: Also Chuchunya-related.
UNDERSTUDY: There's something genuinely wrong with you.
NARRATOR: Alright, alright! I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. Give me one more, I promise I'll be reasonable about this one.
UNDERSTUDY: Fine. Roswell.
NARRATOR: Okay, that's not fair. That one was actually me.
UNDERSTUDY: What?!
NARRATOR: I was delegated to contact a young Sylvia Carlos without any direct interference. You know she hailed from New Mexico, right?
UNDERSTUDY: Forget this. Let's just get back to the story.
Lara marched into the Russell wearing a grin that would compel the basilisk to glance away awkwardly and pretend it was staring at someone else. Madeleine followed her about two steps behind, arms folded behind her back.
"Ma'am?" the porter tried, leaning over the front desk and waving erratically. "Ma'am, can I help you?"
From a small black bag slung over her shoulder, Lara drew and smoothed out a crisp fifty and slid it across his desk. "If a girl named Melanie shows up, let her know this is hers if she can just look the other way."
He grinned. "It's gonna cost you more than that."
She ceased smiling. He took that as an invitation to do the same.
"Y- yes, ma'am. Of course."
"Excellent. With me, Whitman."
Lara excused their ways up the stairs. Madeleine sighed.
"I admire your dedication as a matter of course. But as your colleague, I have to question what a misuse of time and resources, and a mishandling of hazardous-"
"Yeah, I know. But come on. we're this close to omnipotence! Can you imagine what you could do with that kind of power?"
"Definitively infinite things."
"Now let's do a bit of risk assessment. Let's look at how the odds are stacked."
"They're not promising."
"Let's say... oh, everything I'm doing has a one-in-a-billion chance of working. Fair enough? Nobody in history has ever pulled this off before."
"That's not how empirical probabilities work," Madeleine seethed.
"And what's infinity divided by a billion?"
Another sigh. "Infinity."
"Exactly. Hey! We've just proved this is an infinitely good idea!"
She rapped upon the third door they passed. "Anyone in?"
No response. She grinned to her partner, and repeated the chain of miniscule saws she had employed at the museum.
Hanging from the ceiling twixt bed and window at one end and nearly running into the wall by the other was a hairline slice of light impossible to focus on.
"Do you think this is safe?" Madeleine gritted her teeth.
"Probably not." Lara cackled and approached it cautiously. As it bent space its distance was impossible to gauge. She stopped only when she could feel the cold on her face.
"What do you think is in there?"
"Everything that isn't here."
"And that means...?"
Melanie stormed through the door. "Macquarie!"
Discreetly, Lara prised her ancient machete from her bag. She paid Melanie no mind.
"I don't care what kind of following you've pulled together, I'm in charge of looking after the Russell, and I cannot let you toy with the rift. Stand down."
Lara checked the blade over, still not so much as glancing back. "Restrain her, darling."
Madeleine only moved to scowl at her superior, but, and without warning, Melanie gasped and strained and groaned, clutched her stomach, stumbled against the wall, struggled to so much as enunciate her pain. Still Lara ignored her and raised the blade.
"Stop! You could cause irreversible damage to local spacetime!"
"Yes. Or, I could know exactly what I'm doing."
The knife fit perfectly into the crack. Physically, at any rate. Meanwhile, essentially, it had been shoved in far more comfortable places. Its matter melted and burst and froze and hummed and fried and sprung and hovered and realigned and jaywalked and kissed its kids goodnight and learned how to cook chicken tikka masala. Every physical process an object could undergo, it underwent. Every particle shifted into every arrangement of mass that it could, then every arrangement of entropy, then every arrangement of arrangements. It fed off, and into, the fullness of eternity. And then, with the slightest gesture of magical cajolery, it accepted the form Lara willed. She drew it from the rift, and it looked for all the world just as it had the day it was forged.
She tested its weight in her hands. That would do. With the same care by which she had produced it, she returned it to its bag.
"Come now, Whitman. We're done here."
Madeleine clicked her neck to one side. Melanie wheezed and cautiously tested her balance. By all appearances, she could stand again. She jabbed a finger at Lara.
"You could have torn this whole building apart!"
"And you could have walked away with fifty bucks in your pocket. But that's just not what happened."
Lara and Madeleine marched out in the same formation with which they had entered. Melanie knew better than to follow.
UNDERSTUDY: Can we go back to talking about the afterlife?
NARRATOR: Of course. Oh! Funny story about that, actually. Before I got here, there were talks of a project to create Heaven. It was actually my first assignment, and I was proud of what I'd done. Then, at the last minute, I get word of technical difficulties higher up. Suddenly I've got to scrap the whole thing.
UNDERSTUDY: So the afterlife just doesn't exist?
NARRATOR: That's right! Now if you die, all that results is the permanent cessation of consciousness on every level. Hell, if you'd like, or an infinite degree of removal from a higher power. The act of the universe simply forgetting you'd ever existed.
UNDERSTUDY: If that's your measure of a funny story, I'd hate to hear the serious ones.
NARRATOR: It's people like you who get me down. Acting as if I'm obliged to build and run Elysium for all eternity.
The Editor appears beside us, or maybe she'd been there for a while. The certainty of her presence feels logically unstable, like a dream.
EDITOR: And yet, you believe yourself to be God.
NARRATOR: In all fairness, I did create the universe.
EDITOR: No, you didn't. Don't you get it? You're not an auteur, auteurs are myths. You think writing something means it's all under your name?
NARRATOR: Naturally.
EDITOR: Yes? Well, whose labyrinth is hosting it? Whose magic is manifesting it? Whose dark mind is dreaming it? Not yours.
NARRATOR: But any old demon could do those things, surely?
EDITOR: And it would be worse for it. Besides.
She points at the black sun, which now sits exactly above us.
EDITOR: You know what she'll have to say about i-
Her voice cuts out. Everyone's voice cuts out, and the world is plunged into dead silence. From here, I can see that there's an accretion disk around the sun, although it moves more like an eyelid. It even eclipses the sun when it blinks. It sheds a single black tear, which hits the ground in front of us and kicks up a tall, black splash. The splash hardens into the shape of a folded umbrella, with its handle shaped into a face screaming in terror. Or is it laughing? Either way, whatever light illuminates this place swings quickly around the umbrella, and it casts a shadow around itself like a sundial. The shadow cuts a shape into the ground, and from it emerges an old woman in black funeral robes.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: You've all worked so hard, and I don't want you to think I'm criticizing you. Think of my comments as my way of engaging with your art.
She's not speaking. She's signing, but I've never learned any sign language at all. I don't know how I understand her. She turns to face us, and the right side of her face is entirely torn away, right temple to left cheek, to reveal darkness. Despite my exact task, I don't have the words to describe how dark it is. In the past, I'd seen a lot of things silhouetted too darkly to make out in front of blinding lights. Here, the void in her face is so dark the rest of her face seems too bright to focus on. Her hair is also black, and it seems to stretch on forever, down through the floor.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Editor, I'm afraid I'm not a demon, even if you don't like to think anyone else could have you under their employ. I'm a witch, if only in a very unconventional sense.
EDITOR: I understand, ma'am.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Narrator. We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.
NARRATOR: You know Barthes?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: The Overseer might enjoy your mannerisms, but the Editor is right about your significance. And if all you think it takes to makes yourself useful is to quote the esoteric and obfuscate meaning, you're admitting to being the least valuable part of your coterie.
The narrator grumbles, but bows anyway.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: And you. Her understudy.
I think I tense up. She clasps her hands together and, even without a mouth, the rest of her face implies a smile.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: The part of the sundial which casts a shadow is actually called a gnomon! I thought you might be interested to know that.
UNDERSTUDY: Thank you.
I signed that, and I have no idea how.
Further from the harbour than Macquarie and Whitman, the streets were gripped with that mid-April gaucheness placeable only to Sydneysiders, born and raised. Hope and Marie both, of course, fit the bill, even if they would only dub each other as such with as much sarcastic force placed upon the 'raised' aspect as they could.
In the wake of recent revelations, Selene's shop seemed to loom larger than reality, so tremendous now that one might go so far as to call it 'almost mid-sized'.
"Well," Hope shrugged, "point of no return."
"What are you implying?"
"I just think you're making a fair few leaps of logic, darl, and if there ever was a time to turn around and reconsider the evidence before talking to Selene again, it's now."
"What is it with you and always sitting around and waiting for conditions to be 100% right before acting? That was the takeaway of your training, too."
"That's not... look, Marie. I've been in trouble with the law. Yeah? I know the risks that come with this bullheaded vigilantism, and I've been around the block enough times to know when that risk is and isn't necessary. And honestly, there's bound to be a better way than this. I can feel it in me waters."
"Your waters."
"That's what I said."
"I know. I was there. We don't even have any, do we?"
Hope blinked. "Amniotic fluid?"
"Yeah."
"No, darl. I suppose strictly speaking, we do not."
"Right."
"How are you, anyway? You bounced back from braindeath quick enough."
"It still hurts. Honestly, it still really freaking hurts."
"Oh, I-"
"I mean! Not that I feel any ill will toward you or anything for taking me out there. It's just that I'm not going to accept something as a well-informed idea now just because it's come out of your mouth."
"Look, darl. I understand, but you've gotta remember that all matters surrounding deeplighter relations have gotta be handled with extreme care. I know you're jumping to get in there and throw your weight around, but easy on. You've gotta be methodical."
"Of course."
Marie was outstandingly methodical. In this situation, her method was to throw the door open and march in, blustering for an explanation. Selene was predictably mortified. So too was her sole concurrent customer, an elderly man in a flat cap and tacky denim jacket.
"Wh- what's going on...?" all three tried to articulate, in vaguely similar ways.
"Selene Antonio," Marie retried, "I need to speak to you."
"Very good."
"In private."
"Of course."
"Now."
"Marie..." she frowned. "I'm with a customer..."
"How rude..." the old man muttered, which would come to be recognised in history textbooks as the least relevant utterance in human history.
"I'm going to consult Macquarie with information which may implicate you in the murder of Phoebe Deckard. If you have any evidence to the contrary... well, I thought I'd come here first."
Selene glanced at the man, but couldn't maintain eye contact as she insisted, "Sorry Mr. Hughes, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to leave the building..."
"It's for my son's bloody funeral!"
"It'll be for mine, too, if I don't take this."
He sighed and shuffled out. His biological granddaughter had entered shortly after Marie, and he mumbled homophobic perjoratives in her vague direction on the way out.
She rolled her eyes and walked to Marie's side. "I s'pose you oughta take your theory from the start."
"She knows what she did, surely?"
"It'll look back of Bourke if it isn't her."
Selene threw her hands in the air. "I swear, I didn't do it! Why would I? She was my friend!"
"Why? I don't know. But it had to be you." Marie shrugged.
"I don't understand..."
"Well, see, it all started about... this time yesterday, when I fell off a cliff."
"Come again?"
"I saw a tree which had grown through the rock face and split it perfectly cleanly. Almost exactly the same way I saw Phoebe's split, in fact."
"So you think I hid a plant somewhere near her soul gem, and I just made it grow?"
"She wore it on her navel. It stands to reason that such a plant would have taken root in her stomach or gut flora or something."
"I mean... that would make sense..."
Marie began pacing around Selene now. Something which had... changed, been rebuilt, in her chrysalis... was deeply enjoying this, although her remainder doused the sensation in the deepest, most private of guilts. "The very night before, she and I had stopped by here for tea."
"Hold on. Wouldn't you be dead too, then? This theory doesn't make any sense!"
"I just sipped at mine. She downed her entire cup. Guess there was a lethal dose I just didn't reach, some kind of threshold you need to gain control. I imagine otherwise you could beat the shit out of me with the pollen in the air right now. But if I recall correctly, you did seem genuinely surprised when I remarked that it tasted fine."
Hope cleared her throat.
"Alright. I'll admit that bit's not totally watertight yet." She stopped pacing. "Then, right after my own contract, you said something about not wanting me to touch your clothes. You'd claimed they had some chemical you didn't want me getting on my bare skin. With the Incubator present during my first vision, I have no reason to believe word couldn't have gotten out about the nature of my... ability."
"That's a stretch! Really, Marie, this is such a fucked up thing to kid around about! She was my friend!"
"Provide me with one single piece of evidence to disprove my claims." Marie looked over her own knuckles disinterestedly. "But I can already take a guess at what kind of defence you have at the ready, and it practically proves I'm right."
"Marie!" Hope barked. "A little professionalism'd be nice."
"Please. I'm applying as little professionalism as I can."
"Hold on!" Selene almost cried out. "If there was some great big... death plant, grown inside her, how come the investigation didn't turn anything up?"
"Good question. Remind me, who did we have on that case? Because I vaguely remember someone by the name 'Selene Antonio'."
She backed up. "No, no, that's not..."
"And you certainly seemed pretty sure that Thalia was the one to do it, for someone who managed to turn up no evidence whatsoever."
Marie was on Selene now like a falcon. She had nothing left to say.
And then she stopped.
"But this is all bullshit, right?"
"Wh... what...?"
"Come on, relax! I'm just messing with you!"
"O- oh? Oh! Hahahaha... right! Right. Yeah! Of course it wasn't me! She was like a sister to me!"
"Ha! See, that's what I thought. You're totally innocent."
"Oh, thank the goddesses. I thought you were seriously going to tell Marquess Macquarie that you thought I'd killed someone!"
"Of course not!"
"Hahaha... ha..."
"And because you're innocent, naturally you'd have no objection to me touching every object in this room."
"Alright! Yes! Alright, I killed her!"
"Why?"
"I don't know, I- it was definitely me! I'm guilty! Take me in!"
Hope leaned forward. Marie raised an eyebrow. "Who are you covering for?"
"Nobody, I-"
But Marie wasn't going to wait for an answer. She leaned on the wall and jumped at the sound of Madeleine punching the space beside her with enough strength to shake the windows. Selene shrank beneath her fist.
"What did I tell you?!"
"I'm sorry, I couldn't think of a way to-"
"I said neutralise! I'd never say kill!"
"I panicked and-"
"And what? Took the life of our only envoy to the outside world?"
She stared at the girl and said nothing, made roughly no motion as notions of pearly white mantle unfurled like the stuff of mercantile beholdings descent from her shoulders. Augmenting her fist to the cuff of the wrist was her gauntlet. It ruffled her victim to see, or it haunted, and she - neither she - took ahold of the friction between them to speak but a dictum for death, and a freak of a silence hung free. Suddenly, all the breath in Selene quickly left, and she leaned back and screamed, though, bereft of the air, only barely. They stared twixt themselves for three seconds. Then, well, Whitman reckoned that nicely sufficed and then shelved (synecdoche) her reproach of no motion.
She metamorphosed back into her humanswear, stepped away, and the apparent pain cut off. "Mind you, this isn't completely unsalvageable."
"It isn't?"
"It's still a bipartisan crisis we can use to turn the city against the six-fingered woman. And Deckard did appoint an effective successor. But because of what you've done... well, I can promise that in
Macquarie's absence, you are to be stripped of all Attendant protection, and-"
"I've seen enough," Marie decided.
"Please... please," Selene begged, "don't tell anyone she knew. Tell the Marquess, do whatever you want with me, but don't bring Whitman into it. Please, that's all I ask."
"Do you care about her that much?"
"No, she can't know I let you find out she was involved."
"Are you afraid she's going to kill you in turn?"
"I... don't think that's a mercy she offers."
Marie pushed off of the wall. "Fine. Fuck it. Whatever. But you still killed the one person who could have guided me out of my current life situation, and you stole my trust the whole time. I don't care about the law, or whether I'll be rewarded for figuring this whole case out. All I want is for you to hurt like I have. Come on, Hope."
Hope glanced back and half-jogged out after Marie's own departure.
"So what's the verdict, Phryne?"
"She's our girl. Working on order of someone whose identity I shouldn't disclose."
"Righto. Well, what happens now?"
"I'll leave that up to Macquarie."
"You really think punishing her's the way to go?"
"She did something inexcusable."
"Fair go. Just... doesn't sound all that much like something she plans on doing again."
"So?"
"D'you believe in punitive or corrective justice, darl?"
"Is now really the time to wax philosophical?"
"Well... you're making an important ethical decision, so yes. Now is exactly the time."
Marie rolled her eyes.
"D'you genuinely believe suffering for its own sake is something she deserves, or does it just make you feel a bit dodge to think that someone who has killed mightn't need to be hurt for it?"
"You're not excusing her, are you? Don't you miss Phoebe?"
Hope sighed. "Dunno. S'pose it doesn't matter, ay? For someone who sees so many ghosts, you sure can't bring the dead back."
"I know."
"I guess you'll be taking this to Lara then."
"I think... I think it's for the best that I do."
EDITOR: Please, your highness.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: No honorifics, if it's all the same. That kind of vanity doesn't interest me.
EDITOR: Alright. Would you mind telling us why we've assembled here? Or why the Magician is absent?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Her absence is owed to the fact that I have sent her to collect your Overseer. It's a pointless endeavour, I know, but it's because of her irreverence and disobedience that I value her expertise so much in the first place. Oh, well.
She lifts a single finger and effects a portal significantly clearer and bigger than those I've seen the demons make. The Magician and a magical girl I don't know are drawn through it.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I would like you all to meet the Eudaimoniac. The Magician has been privately training her to do the one thing I can't.
EUDAIMONIAC: Pleased to meet you.
The other demons look her up and down. Neither of them ask the Abyss to elaborate.
UNDERSTUDY: And what's that?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I asked you all to come here because I'm afraid we might have to fight the Brass Knight sometime.
EDITOR: And you're entrusting that to a magical girl? I thought that thing's power was in excess of a demon's own.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I still haven't decided who I'm entrusting this to. That we will even cross swords is still unclear, let alone whatever circumstances we'd fight it under. But she has survived multiple encounters with it. Only one other of us can make that claim, and that would be me. Eudaimoniac, could I ask you to walk us through everything you know?
EUDAIMONIAC: Of course. Although everything I know isn't very much, I'm sorry.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Your expertise is still valuable.
EUDAIMONIAC: Thank you. What I can say is that nothing seems to harm it. If you can read its attacks, which are inhumanly ruinous and almost invisible, then you have to match its speed. If you can match its speed, fast enough to bend time and space, you need to be able to overpower it. If you can match its strength, stronger than a demon, you need to pierce its hide. If you can pierce its hide, which no weapon can break, you need to drive your blade in. And even then, that might not be enough. Its skin must be a cubit and a half thick, and able to change shape at will.
NARRATOR: That doesn't sound all that different from supposing that it can't be harmed by physical means at all.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: What weaknesses do you think it has?
EUDAIMONIAC: Aside from occasional sentimentality, I don't think it has any.
UNDERSTUDY: It's going to run out.
Everyone looks at me.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: What is?
UNDERSTUDY: It's something I just remembered. One day, its future sight is going to run out. Then it might be open to making mistakes.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: What makes you think it won't have achieved everything it intends to by then?
UNDERSTUDY: You asked me not to talk about that. Or you will have, or something.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I see. Eudaimoniac, what else have you learned?
EUDAIMONIAC: I'm ashamed to admit it, but I think I might have made it stronger.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: How much stronger?
EUDAIMONIAC: I let it repair the wear and tear of its armor.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Only physically, then. Nothing worth worrying about. Is that all?
EUDAIMONIAC: Yes.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Thank you. That will have to be enough until we can learn more.
TRANSCRIPT ENDS.
Margaret made for one last stairwell, directly to the roof. Before she was even at the door, she fired off a bullet into a lock she didn't have the time to check. Under her weight, it sprained open, and the cool desert night air greeted her with a slap to the face.
The perimeter of the building and a short way out were contained in some manner of dome of luminous dust, all clearly moving with intent, ineffable as it was, into some grandiloquent, fractalline design. It looked almost like...
"What now?"
Alice cast a cluster of daggers at their host, but Christie's shield was far from eager to care. The two were engaged in near-lockstep, a fight as much as a funerary dance for the tacky splendor at all angles, now being consumed by the flames of their champion's passion.
"We're up near some kind of penthouse. I'm guessing it's a secret emergency exit of some kind, must be like the only window in the building."
"Seriously?"
Christie tossed her shield in the air and manifested a rapier in either hand. In a flurry of sharp, mechanical action, she lunged and forced Alice back with one, and sliced her throwing wrist open with the other. With her adversary caught up in the pain, she concluded with two cuts to the wince-exposed jugular, turned on her back foot, sheathed her blades, caught the shield between her fingers.
Alice slumped against the wall. Ashes in the air without clarity of purpose took to the intermolecular pull of her blood and clung to her neck. Her vision burned faint.
"Yeah, casinos don't have windows, y'know. That's how they simulate constant daylight and make you lose track of time."
"Wow."
"I'd make fun of you for not knowing about this, but I'm hit so hard I think I might be medically dead."
"You still on her tail?"
"Good grief, man! Let me heal up first!"
"I only ask because... she seems to be forming some kind of pseudo-barrier out here, and if she has that level of control, I don't wanna know what she's gonna do to the building if she gets out."
With that being said, there existed little in the way of help Margaret could offer, a truth ever eager to present itself in a harmony of deafening mechanical whirs loud enough to draw her attention to the tremendous white 'H' on the concrete where she stood. Deeper of the two was the rumble of blades in the ashen air. She heard the helicopter before she saw it, and even by feline hearing, felt the sound in her chest before her ears. The identities (or identity, as it were) of the three well-dressed, well-groomed, slightly molten crew of the craft were not a surprise, but the higher whir - that of a long, black rotating shaft extending from its door - was, in the fraction of a second between Margaret's understanding of what she was seeing and her yet more intimate understanding of the size and weight of its bullets, something she would have called an unpleasant surprise.
"Alice?"
"What is it now?"
"Where's the penthouse?"
"At the end of the wall..." and across the qualia gap, "...stretching out to your right. Why?"
"I'm about to do something really, really cool."
"Oh no."
Alice, meanwhile, had dragged herself in behind Christie, who in turn was mid-pilfer through a safe in the wall. A tournament-legal-sized deck's worth of false I.D. cards assigned to various states brimmed out of her pockets, and as her implied gaze met Alice's, she concealed one last small handful inside her jacket. Even with all the strength Alice could pull together in such a state, both knew she wouldn't so much as land a blow.
"You're still standing? I thought I made it clear the show's over."
"Hhh... hheugh..."
"Sorry, kid. I don't stick around for afterparties."
"Hey, Castafiore... wanna hear another note that can break glass?"
Margaret faked left, then sprinted right. She'd never handled a machine gun like that before, but it looked slower to pivot around than it ever had in movies.
The helicopter, however, was not. This would not be a problem if the pilot and gunner lacked coordination, but as it was, they were exactly the same person. The sights were trained back on her before she made it to the edge, and before the sounds of fire came to Margaret, there was a searing, deathly pain shredding through her left ankle, her shoulder, her stomach, her stomach again. The shock was a heart-skipping anaesthetic, and it took all of her will to repress it at a moment so crucial. What replaced it was the agony, the unimaginable bluntness of four heavy lead chunks embedded in her, draining the life from her all too quickly, that she dropped off the edge.
Of course, it was the very nature of a Daughter of Fright to meet a moment of terror with equal power. For Margaret, naturally, that was her aim. Enough so, in fact, that she could still drop in on Christie, just... significantly faster now.
Christie already had her shield and blade raised to Alice. In two seconds, she could have her head severed clean. Little did she know, that - and of course it took very little time to discover - two seconds were not hers to have.
Her neck outpaced her shield arm, and made it just in time to see a battered, bleeding, almost dead, and alarmingly smug catgirl pass by her window upside-down, and at alarming speed. The most immeasurably miniscule moment after her passage by called back the shout of her rifle, raised obliquely to compensate her fall, pronouncing through the glass in no time at all a single strike to Christie's back.
She fell to the ground.
The barrier destabilized. The helicopter crashed. The spread of the flames slowed a pace. It was over.
Margaret didn't know her cars very well, much less in the dead of night, much, much less when she had more blood outside than in, but she knew whatever the hell this was that had probably belonged to Christie was a hell of a lot nicer than the old gig.
"Interior's leather, okay? So let's heal ourselves up before we get in."
Alice winced. "You got your grief seeds?"
She passed one. "You got the shield?"
"Yep."
"You break the gem?"
Alice had asked the first firefighter she could to take it down to some backwater second-hand store or other, the kind of place with enough wax candles for Christie to see to a new form and make a fresh start. Margaret and Christie had seen something in each other, something so compellingly recognised within themselves, for Alice to have the heart to kill her.
"Yeah."
"That's a pretty suspicious pause."
"I did lose... a lot of blood."
Margaret sighed.
"And by the way... you don't need to keep hiding your accent around me."
"I'm not- I don't... hell, alright. Sogoddamnbeit."
Satisfied with their regeneration, they assumed their regular formation and posture within the new car.
"I'm only now realizin' we don't actually have anywhere to go from here. You wanna pick someplace? Anywhere that's not here or San Fran."
Alice grinned. "Your hometown, then."
"Or there."
"What? Why?"
"Same reason I went and moved all the way out to Cali. Didn't wanna be there."
"Hmph... alright. Where is 'there', anyway?"
"Decoverley."
"Sorry, where?"
"You know." Margaret spun a hand. "Capital of Hancock. You don't know your geography?"
"No! I mean, yes! I mean, what are you talking about? Since when was there a state called Hancock?"
"Since forever. It's just one of those states nobody talks about, like Utah, or Ohio, only... more."
Alice was willing to buy that. "You got a map?"
"Keep one in the bag for whenever I've had to skip town." She reached over to the back seat and retrieved it. "See, there it is. Bordering New Mexico, Texas, and South Oliviera."
"Huh. So it is."
"Point is, we're gonna hit up somewhere where there ain't no-one who knows who I am, alright? Somewhere like L.A., or Phoenix."
"Hold on, if you've been moving around enough to warrant a map... does that mean there are like a dozen other Alices out there you've just left behind?"
"Course not! I'd never find another chump big enough to rope into this job."
"Wow. Thanks."
"My pleasure. Now, L.A. or Phoenix?"
Alice groaned. "Phoenix, why the hell not."
"Works for me."
POSTSCRIPT
UNDERSTUDY: Well, now that the transcript has officially ended, the Narrator won't be able to see the rest of it.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Good work. I don't like to speak badly of the absent, but the demons can be more than a little arrogant at times.
She looks down.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I wouldn't want to show weakness in front of them, even if there's so little they could do even then. The truth, twice as much.
UNDERSTUDY: I'm not sure why you need my help, though. I don't know what I could do that you couldn't alone.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: You can learn from the demons. I can't.
UNDERSTUDY: Learn what, exactly?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Mortalkind mistook me for a force of creation, from which all things are possible, and the Brass Knight as a force of destruction. Actually, the opposite is true.
UNDERSTUDY: That seems like a pretty major thing to be wrong about.
She laughs, even without a face or a voice.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: When you say it like that, I agree. But the confusion is in our intentions. I want to learn from the universe, and for that, I need the demons to keep it alive. All I can do is end it. The Brass Knight, on the other hand...
EUDAIMONIAC: Is everything alright?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Of course. Sometimes an old woman has to mourn for what she can't have. I think the Brass Knight would have wanted to learn from it, too. Nobody unleashes so much disorder without a little curiosity. But at the same time, it's sure whatever I want to learn from the mortal world is information I could use to defeat it. Therefore, it has to end. So here we are, struggling hopelessly to make use of each other's power while avoiding being pulled into fulfilling the other's goal.
UNDERSTUDY: And you can't tell the others?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: They can't know we're losing.
UNDERSTUDY: And what happens if we lose?
She leans her weight on her umbrella.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Would it be alright if I called you Alice?
UNDERSTUDY: I thought that name was cut out of me.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Yours? No, I never needed to. It wouldn't have made a difference to very much.
UNDERSTUDY: Then by all means, Alice it is.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: And you, Nedjem?
EUDAIMONIAC: If I could call you Mother in return.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I won't believe I've earned it, but if you must. Alice.
UNDERSTUDY: Yes?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Note this, and if you ever doubt the means to our ends, read it over again, over and over, until it becomes a part of you. If the Brass Knight wins, we wouldn't just lose the universe. We would lose so much more that we'd never find the chance to grieve for it. If it wins, fourteen billion years of existence won't have achieved anything. Right now, the Brass Knight can control every particle in the atoms which makes up matter. Imagine if it could control every variable in every axiom which makes up logic. Imagine complete power to write and unwrite reality in the hands of something which has forgotten how to want anything except to ignite the Deep Light. Then imagine every level of our reality, even those you've never known and never can know, rebuilt only to fuel it. With such a fixed purpose, emotion can't exist. Knowledge can't exist. Time and mass and energy can't exist, because nothing can ever change. What does that look like to you?
UNDERSTUDY: I...
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: You don't know.
UNDERSTUDY: No.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Do you want to?
UNDERSTUDY: I can't say I do.
EUDAIMONIAC: And what's the Deep Light? Is it like Ra?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: In terms of stature, you could say that. But from a conceptual standpoint, she's much more straightforward. Alice, has the Narrator taught you about the Form of the Good?
UNDERSTUDY: To an extent.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Would you like to try to explain it?
UNDERSTUDY: Right! So the way I've come to know it is that in the Realm of Forms is every idea which could possibly exist, each in its own definitive, eternal state. Now by that logic, you could expect the Form of ideas itself to be the conceptually purest. But it's not. Ranking above it is the Form of the Good. And it's not necessarily moral good, it's more like the state everything "wants" to be in. Falling objects want to be at the ground, reacting chemicals want to become stable, arguments want to resolve, people want to acquire more wisdom. That's just the inherent trajectory those things head towards.
I try to collect my thoughts.
UNDERRSTUDY: I think Plato said something about... the Sun isn't your eyes, but it lets you see. The Good is the same with knowing.
EUDAIMONIAC: So it's some kind of star?
UNDERSTUDY: No, it's just an analogy.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I'm sorry. The two of you are too different, epistemologically, to get this across all the way. I'm sure talking without a language barrier is enlightening, but the idea of metaphor isn't something that existed for hundreds of years after Nedjem's life.
UNDERSTUDY: Really?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Comparison existed, but not analogy like the rhetorical device you know it as today. We owe that to some Semitic and Greek literary traditions that wouldn't form for another thousand years.
UNDERSTUDY: So all those clay pots shaped like gods they had were actually those gods?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: That's right.
UNDERSTUDY: But they're clay.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: That's right. And they're also gods. The funerary practices symbolized sending a soul into the Land of the Dead, but they were the exact act of doing that, too. The Pharaoh was more than a sign of the will of the gods, on that note. He was their avatar. Does this sound contradictory?
UNDERSTUDY: Let me guess. It's irony.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: It's older than irony. It's older than deciding that what something can be and what it can't are mutually exclusive, even though that might feel like the most logical thing in the world.
UNDERSTUDY: Alright, but... how come the Narrator knows what metaphors are, then, if she's supposed to be a million years older?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: ...Let's call her an unfortunate exception to the rule. She thinks I created her, because all her memories of mortal life have been erased.
UNDERSTUDY: And you've never corrected her?
She sighs.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: If you could see the way she was before I controlled her, you'd know why I don't regret it. She was delusional and power-hungry, and while that much hasn't changed, she was itching to annihilate anyone and anything that challenged her belief in her own omnipotence and omniscience. She needed a new start, one where she understood her limits. And more than that, she needed you to watch her.
UNDERSTUDY: What for?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: In case she ever forgets where she belongs. The Brass Knight forgot. Now look at what a life it's eked out for itself.
EUDAIMONIAC: But what does this have to do with the Deep Light?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Well, the Deep Light is Good.
EUDAIMONIAC: Then isn't it a good thing for it to be lit?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: If you can compare certain aspects - but not all of her, she doesn't have the light or heat or shape - to the Sun, you need to imagine how terrible it would be if the Sun was created right in front of you. You'd be turned into energy and particle dust. That's what the Deep Light would bring to the universe, and that's just the act of creating her. Think what the Brass Knight would do to keep her lit.
UNDERSTUDY: You keep saying "her".
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: She isn't me, and I'm not her. but on some chiral level, we come from the same thing. And when you take away the light...
She points at the half of her face in darkness.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: You have a shadow. I'm sorry for taking away your voices. I just thought it would be more comfortable if we all spoke the same way, and a shadow can't make a sound.
UNDERSTUDY: So you're what the Narrator would call apophatic.
EUDAIMONIAC: But what does that make you, Mama? The Form of the Evil?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: What would that be? An idea which everything rejects? The direction everything moves away from?
UNDERSTUDY: Dark energy.
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Dark energy?
UNDERSTUDY: Your essence is what's accelerating the expansion of the universe, isn't it?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Very good, Alice! You've solved in no time at all what might take the Incubator another two million years.
UNDERSTUDY: But why?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I wanted to know what happened if I forced him to accelerate your evolution. I wanted to learn what the full potential of magical girls could be.
UNDERSTUDY: Did you get your answer?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: I have this feeling I might find out soon. When does the narrative introduce Mækiu?
UNDERSTUDY: I think it wasn't long after me and Margaret burned down the casino. Oh! No, I remember it was that Wednesday, actually. Right, because it was the first night of Passover. I can say that in front of an Ancient Egyptian noble and they won't start a pointless argument, right?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Nedjem comes from a very different kingdom. That's like telling an Anglo-Saxon you hate Margaret Thatcher.
UNDERSTUDY: Alright. That's fair. Side note, I do hate Margaret Thatcher.
EUDAIMONIAC: Who's Margaret Thatcher?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: Nedjem, my darling daughter. You are a good-natured girl, and you believe in peace and honor in the heart of every living thing. And for that reason, I'll tell you later.
UNDERSTUDY: Should I stop writing at this point?
ALL-PERMEATING ABYSS: If that's alright.