XIV.
"Bullshit," Miki says. "How do you know?"
I'm a time traveler. Why does everyone need proof?
"Why here?"
Homura freezes and looks at Madoka and those damn black ribbons. "What do you mean?"
"Just… why here?" Madoka's brows are knit, furrowed tight. "Is there something here that it particularly wants or likes? It's not born here like a lot of witches."
"I…" Homura has never thought of that. Witches are magical girls, feeding on the despair that made them in the first place. It's possibly wandering for its next meal but then… what other cities had been destroyed? What had been in its path before?
"I don't know," she finally admits.
Miki scoffs. "Of course you don't. You don't even know what you're talking about, do you?"
"Miki-san," Tomoe says quietly. "Akemi-san is correct. At least on the existence of Walpurghis Nacht. I've never seen it, but every magical girl who has lasted a year or more has heard of it, know of it. Generally, we avoid it. It's not a witch to take lightly." She hesitates. "Granted, I'm not certain of why and Kyubey doesn't speak much of it."
"You didn't ask me to."
Homura's entire body tenses as she turns to watch the incubator march over and take a cookie, easy as can be.
"The reason is quite obvious," they continue. "If you stop to think about it. No one ever does, no one ever asks. Well, it seems Akemi may know, isn't that so Akemi Homura?"
Homura almost takes the bait and shoots it into cheese. But she stops, considers, and says. "If the reason is obvious, then you should explain it, shouldn't you?"
A human would have been offended, blustered. A particularly smart human would have caught the trap and turned it against her.
But incubators were not human, and unashamedly so. They saw the trap, and simultaneously decided it wasn't worth not springing, since she had politely asked after all.
"That is because it is many magical girls coming together in the name of destruction," Kyubey tells them without a flick of its tail. "Magical girls become witches in the end and witches deserve a coven, do they not?"
Of course it leaves chaos in its wake by saying it that way but then again, Mami had shot Kyoko when she'd found out, so.