The multicolored swirling energies coalesced into the figure of a little girl, wielding a staff with a sharp gem atop.
She hovered in the middle of an alleyway, two homeless people reacted to her manifestation by running in terror.
Another girl stood opposed to her, clad in an ornate dress with two long red shields attached to her short-sleeved arms.
The dressed girl sighed, and moved her hands to form a "T" shape.
"Ok hang on, time out."
The swirling girl staggered a bit, clearly taken aback by the statement.
"Time out?" Her voice was as primordial as the energy she commanded. "Time out?! This is a battle to the death! There are no 'time outs!' Perhaps you should have stayed back in elementary school, where there are rules that will coddle weaklings!"
"No, please just-" the dressed girl put her hand on her face. "Please just hear me out for a second, you'll get your fight here I just need to ask you a question."
The swirling energies calmed a bit. "Fine. What?"
"Does any of this feel a bit familiar to you?"
HALF A MONTH EARLIER
"Mom? Dad?" Rachel called out.
No response.
She took off her shoes near the door and walked further into her home.
"Guess they aren't home." she said to herself.
Good for her though.
In the middle of her house, Rachel pulled out a small, egg shaped gem. White light enveloped her, and her school uniform transformed into a red dress, with two long shields running along her arms.
The shields slid outwards and revealed a complicated network of gears on the inside, extending into Rachel's arm far past the point of impossibility.
She blinked.
The shield retracted.
She was standing outside on a sidewalk, the sun blasting down on her.
Where she was standing fifteen seconds previous.
A wide smile formed on her face, and she laughed into the air.
For years, Rachel has dreamed of becoming a superhero. She owned all the comics: Marvel, DC, hell, even the niche ones like Image, Boom!, Dark Horse…
And now it was her turn.
Rachel was gifted with a power that in those universes, would be considered 'completely broken.'
She could reverse time fifteen seconds.
Of course it had a limit. She couldn't chain her power, it had a twenty second cool down, which means there were five seconds she was incredibly vulnerable when fighting.
But those fifteen seconds?
She could see every action an enemy would take, plan for their every move. She could read what an opponent would do before they did.
Too bad she's never been in a fight before.
Rachel put her hands on her hips, looking at her neighborhood. She had no doubts of how her power works, after all she already used it in school today.
"The look on her face when I dodged all of her punches…" she snickered to herself.
Come to think of it, something was off about that fight. Sure, she beat her bully into a pulp, but in the audience, there was a girl who looked… out of place. Everyone else was watching with glee, either at getting to see a fight or watching a known prick get her shit handed to her, but one girl had a look of horror on her face.
A look Rachel couldn't shake from her mind.
Rachel didn't know much about that girl, both of them mostly kept to themselves, natural loners.
"You're getting used to your power very quickly, Rachel Somers!"
A white catlike creature walked along the sidewalk and sat down in front of her. His voice, that of a small child, was telepathically broadcasted into her mind. "It's surprising, actually! Usually Magical Girls take more time to get used to their new status, but you've been doing your work in spades! You already have three grief seeds!"
"Well Kyubey, I couldn't do it without this power, which thanks for, by the way!"
"Have you given some thought as to what you want to wish for?"
Rachel sighed. "Kyubey, remind me what my wish was."
Kyubey's tail fwipped. "You first wished for infinite wishes."
"Which you said you couldn't do, hey, just wanted to try!" Rachel shrugged.
"Then you wished for the oppertunity to use your wish at any moment in the future."
"And I'll use my wish when I feel I need it." Rachel laughed. "For now, I can be the superhero I've always wanted to be! I can stop bank robberies, rescue hostages, kill bad guys… I got my wish Kyubey, I'll treat my other wish like a… 'get out of jail free' card of sorts. With it I can…
Rachel stopped.
"I can…"
She looked down.
"I'm having the weirdest sense of deja vu right now."
Several moments passed, with sounds of daytime ambience filling her ears. A few people stopped to point at her, as the seconds turned to minutes. She was deep in thought, sitting out in the middle of the sidewalk with an ornate dress on.
"Kyubey, have we done this before?"
"What?" asked Kyubey.
"I feel like we've had this exact conversation, like these same beats. You come here and talk to me, ask about my wish, we talk some more, people look at me while walking by like I'm some insane girl talking to an invisible cat, and then my parents-"
Rachel watched a car slow down near her house, pulling into the driveway. Her dad waved from the front seat.
"... get home… I… I tried to tell them what I became and they kept… asking me-"
Dad got out of the car.
"That's a nice dress, where did you get it?"
Rachel ignored her, continuing her stream of consciousness. "And then mom comes out and says 'that's-'"
"That's beautiful! Did you get it from a friend?"
Rachel stood there for five seconds, staring blankly at her parents. Mom grew increasingly concerned.
"Honey?"
Rachel held out her shield, and opened the mechanism.
The car pulled into the driveway, and she headed inside her house, quickly switching back to her human form.
"What the hell is happening?" she asked out loud.
"I'm not quite sure," said Kyubey. "Your power doesn't extend into the future, only the past. What you did back there should be impossible."
"But how did I do it!" yelled Rachel. "Tell me what's happening! Why do I know what's going to happen next!"
"I don't know, Rachel Somers. You may be more equipped to learn more about this than me."
Rachel walked up the stairs to her room, slamming her door and locking it. She heard her parents enter the house and call for her name.
She turned to Kyubey. "What other powers do I have?"
"Besides your time manipulation?" asked Kyubey. "Because your wish was outside the realm of normal Magical Girl wishes, you have mild power resistance."
"What does that mean?" asked Rachel.
"It means that if a Magical Girl uses her power on you, it will be slightly less effective than if she used it on another Magical Girl. It's not very useful, to be honest, but maybe you could train it with time. Besides that, just the standard powers of a Magical Girl: increased physicals, Soul Gems, the usual."
Rachel leaned against a wall, covering her eyes with her hand.
"This is fucked up."
HALF A MONTH LATER
"So this is it then!" Rachel had a wide smile on her face. The multicolored swirling energies in front of her coalesced into the figure of a little girl, wielding a staff with a sharp gem atop.
She hovered in the middle of an alleyway, two homeless people reacted to her manifestation by running in terror.
"You will be my first real fight!" yelled Rachel. "Aw man, I can see it now! A true arch nemesis! We'll fight throughout the city, yelling one liners, making quips, it'll be just like a comic!"
"... what?" The girl's voice was as primordial as the energy she commanded. "What the hell are you talking about? Are you saying we should fight… for fun?"
"Yeah!" said Rachel, holding her arms out. "You're the first Magical Girl I've seen! It's only been Witches up until this point, and they're too unintelligent to make a fight fun. But you!" She pointed at the girl, her long shield extending past her arm. "You look smart! Let's have some fun fighting!"
"Is this a game to you?" she said. "You're treating this like a game!?" she yelled.
"Well… kinda?" Rachel shrugged. "Look, we both can harm each other as much as we want, we both got Soul Gems, we can just regenerate from a fight! I don't see why we can't just keep fighting and keep having fun for free here. What, you got somewhere to be?"
Rachel looked down for a second. "Wait…" she turned her head back up to the girl. "Why do I feel like you're going to attack me?"
"Because I am." the girl snapped, sending a stream of primordial energy at Rachel.
But she saw it coming. Something inside her mind knew what the opening attack of this girl was, despite not using her power yet.
Rachel parried the attack with her shield, rushing along the beam, jumping up, and punching the girl in the face. She spiraled down into the concrete below, releasing a shockwave of swirling energy from her crater.
Rachel stood over the girl who was slowly getting back up, the multicolored streams of energy circling her.
"I don't wanna do this, man. I just wanted a cool fight, but then you tried to kill me! I don't wanna kill you!"
The girl shot up, swiping her hand at Rachel and launching a sharp projected blade.
Again, Rachel saw it coming… somehow. She did a front flip over the blade and landed with her foot on the girl's face.
"Alright, enough."
She reached down and grabbed the girl's Soul Gem from her neck, breaking the necklace it was attached to. She cupped it in her hands and jumped back.
"There, I got your Soul Gem. Can we talk now-"
"Oh… oh god no! No please!" The girl fell to her knees, and the energies stopped swirling. "Please god I'll do anything! Don't do it please!"
"What the-" Rachel was dumbfounded.
"Do you want Grief Seeds? Magical Girl locations? I can give them to you! Please just let me live! Please!"
"Jesus christ!" Rachel tossed the gem back to the girl, who caught it frantically. "What the hell is wrong with you? I just wanted a fight and-"
In an explosion of multicolored smoke, the girl disappeared from the alleyway.
Rachel was now alone.
"What the hell was that all about?"
HALF A MONTH LATER
Rachel sat in her bed, transformed into her Magical Girl form, watching a broadcast on her phone.
It had been a full month since she became a Magical Girl, and during that time there had been… several ups and downs. Several panic attacks, several lost friends, several… dead friends…
But she was still alive.
Her power and sense of deja vu always seemed to carry her from encounter to encounter. Witches were a cakewalk, even if killing them made her feel uneasy, like she was killing another Magical Girl.
She'd done that too.
Anything to survive out here, in this new hell that was once a wish come true. Going to school every day was a breeze too. She could ace tests by just walking to the front desk, transforming, ignoring the teacher's yells, and then reversing time once she read all the answers.
She wasn't learning shit, which might screw her over in high school though.
Would she even go to high school?
What would high school aged Magical Girls be like?
… Were there high school aged Magical Girls out there? Everyone she'd met so far was her age, fourteen. She hadn't even met anyone fifteen yet.
They all… they all died before they made it that far.
To take her mind off those thoughts, she focused intently on the broadcast. What was titled as a livestream of an active hurricane destroying some Japanese city was anything but. She learned quickly that humans couldn't really comprehend Magical Girls and Witches. Their minds replaced them with the next most logical thing.
… Like for example, replacing a city-destroying Witch with a hurricane.
There were Magical Girls fighting it. Their weapons made trails while they soared through the air. Trails of yellow… red… pink… blue…
Black…
Five Magical Girls were fighting the witch.
The yellow trail was the first to disappear. The red trail went after it, disappearing soon after. The blue trail was next to fall.
The black and pink trail met, before a building slammed down on top of them.
The camera switched to a different view. The building collapsed down to the floor of the city, creating a massive cloud of dust covering the streets.
Rachel strained her eyes, trying to get as many details as she could.
She could make out a black haired girl in a white dress, and a pink haired girl in a pink dress. The pink haired girl was motionless atop the top half of a destroyed building.
The black haired girl crouched by her body, sitting there for a few seconds.
She stood up.
She reached for her arm.
She twisted something circular on it.
NEGATIVE ONE MONTH LATER
Rachel shot up from her bed. The memories replayed in her head over and over again. Becoming a Magical Girl, the panicking alleyway girl, all her lost friends and allies…
The broadcast she watched in her bed.
She yawned and stretched her arms. Scratching her back as she sat up, and moving the covers off of herself.
"That was a weird dream."