CHAPTER 9: A Soul Sheltered By Iron

"Aaaaaiiiiiyyyyyyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeee!"

Gamma's auditory sensors switched on approximately three point zero one seven five seconds before its other external feedback systems initiated their respective boot-up sequences.

-| SAFE MODE STARTUP |-

-| ENHANCED BIOMECHANICAL LIFEFORM UNIT: ONE ZERO TWO - 'Γ' |-

-| DETECTING NEW HARDWARE COMPONENTS |-

-| INITIALIZING AND INSTALLING NEW HARDWARE |-

"Auuuuuuuggggggggghhhhhhhh!"

Its visual systems had also still not yet been reactivated. All Gamma could do in the interregnum was to make use of the limited data as well as the details leading up to the moment of its prior shutdown and perhaps determine what that sound was and its source.

-| UPDATE IN PROGRESS |-

"Awwwwwwwwnnnnnpppphhhh!"

It knew it had stepped back inside the chamber from where it had first emerged so that the damage inflicted by those strange pseudo-bioforms could be repaired. It also knew that the Cyber Regina was going to use Gamma's down time as an opportunity to integrate even more new components into its core chassis.

-| UPDATE COMPLETE |-

-| DOWNLOADING CONTROL SOFTWARE |-

-| FINALIZING UPGRADE |-

-| REBOOTING SYSTEM FOR NORMAL OPERATIONAL MODE |-

-| 3 |-

-| 2 |-

"Unnnnnnnnngh!"

It was also aware that Unit One Zero Three had just returned after procuring the biological entity that was to serve as the internal base for Unit One Zero Four.

-| 1 |-

Everything went dark. A subsequent electrical jolt traveled from the middle of its central processor down through the tips of every appendage. It was not Gamma's first experience with the sensation, and Gamma found those little spurts to be invigorating.

" - Rsion Completed!" Gamma's auditory system caught the tail end of an external verbal announcement. The closest match Gamma had was to that of the Cyber Regina. Although as a voice that normally bypassed its aural network a direct comparison could not be made, and its analysis software had not yet been brought back online to do the correlation anyhow.

-| UNIT ONLINE |-

-| ENGAGING STARTUP MODE - BOTSLAVE SOFTWARE VER. 1. 0. 1. 1. |-

-| SYSTEM SELF IDENTIFICATION - SLAVE DESIGNATION - |-

-| ENHANCED BIOMECHANICAL LIFEFORM UNIT ONE ZERO TWO - |-

-| UNIT CODENAME - |-

-| Γ |-

-| ALL SYSTEMS FULL POWER |-

Once Gamma had fully undergone its startup procedures and pieced together the context clues, its logical subsystem concluded that those sounds belonged to the biological entity slated to become Unit One Zero Four, and that it was in a separate chamber undergoing the same process Gamma itself had gone through when it was being mechanically augmented. Although the reason it would let out such curious sounds eluded Gamma, as it made no such noises during its stints in the chamber.

"Welcome back, Gamma!" The voice that Gamma had known as The Cyber Regina said. "Step on out and get a good look at your new set of physical upgrades." But Gamma had already had the schematics of these new systems installed in its operating software. Why its creator would insist on doing a redundant visual inspection it did not know. Nonetheless, Gamma complied, stepping to the exact point where it first gazed upon its own reflection, and turned to look at itself.

Except this time, it could not see its mirrored image upon the surface of the wall. Baffled by this sudden inconsistency, Gamma stuck its upper right manipulative appendage out into its field of view. At a sensitivity increase of a factor of three, Gamma's ocular systems could make out a faint distortion that was consistent with the dimensions of its extremity. At an increase of a factor of six, Gamma could again see its reflected visage. To a factor of ten, and its form was satisfactorily visible.

"Surprise!" Its Master spoke. "The latest triumph of Cyber Engineering, as our collective has discovered an innate chemical secretion from those neutralized proto-biological entities' exoskeletal structures which allows them to possess a form of cryptic coloration. I would surmise that it grants them the ability to evade an unenhanced humans' limited perceptual range." Another visual adjustment and Gamma could at last see that whatever substance had been applied to its shell had made its entire form turn translucent. "And when combined with an inactive, atom-thin layer of our specialized nanomachines, you have become virtually invisible," Its Master elaborated.

Gamma ran a second check of its specs, nowhere was there any mention of outfitting it with stealth capabilities. "The reason for that is because this addition is not an integrated part of your material framework," The Cyber Regina, always aware of what Gamma was thinking, replied. "The nature of the chemical bond necessitates the nanomachines to be electrically inert in order to hold together. While I am confident we will solve that shortcoming with time, for now, the only solution was to apply the substance over your body as if it were a simple coat of paint."

Gamma also sensed something else that had been altered and customized in the three hours, thirty-eight minutes, eleven seconds it spent deactivated. It was a heat source, small but detectable. "Ah, yes," Gamma's voluminous, invisible chest at once split in two parts at the center, revealing the visible contents embedded within. "That would be your new power core." A circular mechanism in the cavity opened like a camera shutter and ejected a twelve point seven centimeter long rod that glowed a brilliant white, like a little, hot flame. "A technological marvel far eclipsing that invisibility gloss, it is an exotic form of matter composed entirely of the human ego. When information was made known that the human race could be tapped as such a rich energy reserve, I made it an operational imperative that we unlock the secret to physicalizing and harvesting it."

Gamma switched from visible to infrared to ultraviolet scanners. All views showed its steady, unwavering glow. "From a singular, third party-crafted sample we were able to reverse engineer our own version of the technology consisting of the salvaged remnants of a destroyed one." A materials scan of the top and bottom casing could not conclude what metal it was made of, but Gamma's emission spectrometry breakdown suggested it might exist on the periodic table in the same metallic grouping as gold, silver and copper. "But there was only enough material to develop one, and it took a lot of time and energy to fast-track its creation." It also revealed that it was atomically heavy, well beyond Roentgenium, but the Unit's internal Dosimeter did not detect any signs of radioactivity, a paradoxical conclusion, as the data records showed that all elements heavier than Lead were known to be unstable. "Although I wanted to be the one in possession of this new tech, I was concerned that I may have spread my consciousness too thin and that it may cause compatibility issues as a result. Subsequent risk assessment calculations bore this out, and another recipient would need to suffice." A mechanism automatically retracted the object and sealed it back within the reinforced confines of the aperture. "Since you were the only other subject to be converted while biologically active I concluded you were the one most compatible." Then Gamma's chest closed a second after. "That the synchronization was a success proved I was right yet again. Congratulations."

Gamma also took note of two other major modifications. It was seven point six two centimeters taller than before, there had been an alteration made to the bottoms of its lower appendages, with the prominent inward-curved arch between the ball and the heel reconfigured to feature the retractable nozzle of a booster rocket. "Now you can take to the air too, just like your counterpart Beta," Its Master unveiled. An additional component had been grafted onto the back of its upper main chassis. A pair of meter long, straight-edged wings sprang out at its Master's unspoken behest. "A miniaturized adaptation of the engine slated to be used on the secret successor to the B-21 Raider aircraft." The electrical surge of several actuators and servos clicking on registered in Gamma's active memory banks. "Alas, I spent so much precious time and energy infiltrating their private JWIC System only to find out the design was not a significant step above the designs of their rival nations," The Cyber Regina commented. "I project the balance of military power will shift again at some point in the middle of this century, unless of course we succeed in our overarching objective in ending the need for nation-state conflict once and for all."

A brand new file presented itself on Gamma's visual display. Without thought or question Gamma downloaded and executed it. It was a new set of instructions, another assignment, one which prompted Gamma to turn and head out the door.

"Your new stealth and flight capabilities should prove most useful in carrying out your next task," Its Master said. "The biological individual destined to become Unit One Zero Five Zeta has been located. An electronic train pass was just scanned matching the target's name." A photograph identifying the individual was posted to the corner of Gamma's view. It was labeled with the family name 'Tamaki', like the one retrieved and converted into Unit One Zero Three. "The train goes on this citywide loop during this stretch of hours. Extrapolating from that, I have projected what destinations are to be their likeliest."

Gamma passed Unit One Zero Three in the hall just as it was thinking back to that hospital encounter. It was joined by a brand new model, identified by Gamma's software as Unit One Zero Four, Codename 'Epsilon'. "The city in which they are located is approximately two hundred thirty-six kilometers away, with a two hour, eighteen minute window of opportunity for capture." One Zero Four had just picked up an assortment of red-stained garments off the floor. One Zero Three was holding a lit flame projecting from its appendage up to the fabric, the flickering fire reminding it of that new energy source secured within. "You have been my most standout, most astute, most efficient, unit thus far." Written on one of the pieces was the name 'Tamaki', Gamma's keen visual systems scanned and cataloged it in passing "It is for that reason I trust this procurement to you." It also determined that the substance staining both 'Delta' and the coverings was the animalian body fluid known as 'blood'.

Gamma passed through the exotic energy field covering the entry to their base, then proceeded down the tunnel to the parking garage. "Seeing as I was forced to give you some minor guidance during your last undertaking, I believe it is only appropriate that I allow you to undertake this with one hundred percent autonomy." The Cyber Regina told it as it marched its way up the steps of the building to the top. "I will not be supervising your performance here, only evaluating the data upon your return. Besides," It left Gamma hanging on that pause, a curious move. "I have more pertinent matters to attend to at this time." It lasted a full three point one seven seconds. "That is the other reason this task is yours alone. My work load is unending."

-| ENGAGING FLIGHT PROTOCOLS |-

-| INITIATING TAKEOFF PROCEDURE |-

"Godspeed, Gamma." Its Master uttered the moment its wings extended and its turbo jets ignited. Gamma did not know what context those words were supposed to be useful for, nor was it equipped to consider it. All it knew it needed to do was carry out its next function.

Gamma blasted off, maneuvering straight over a series of large satellite dishes sitting atop the roof of an adjacent building. It turned upwards and transitioned into a pure vertical ascent upon passing them. It registered a low-frequency hum in its audio sensors, tracing its source back to those rooftop fixtures.

-| ALTITUDE: 469.741 METERS |-

-| CLIMBING TO 2500.000 METERS |-

Gamma assumed the preprogrammed flying posture upon reaching its optimal altitude. This allowed it to look down upon the world below, its visual systems taking in the view, zooming in on whatever details piqued its interest. Structures, vehicles, geographic features, and wildlife. It was all so much input to take in.

There was a flock of birds flying in formation at approximately one third of Gamma's altitude. Taxonomic records identified them as the Eastern Spot-Billed Duck. Two hundred meters below that on the roof of a skyscraper. It identified a human face looking up in its general direction. But it did not belong to the target, so Gamma disregarded it and accelerated. Even lower along a highway Gamma spotted a lone figure mounted atop a motorized two-wheeled transport vehicle. They were also not its target, yet Gamma fixated on the vehicle for a full two extra seconds. For what reason would a biological creature, one so frail and prone to experiencing a fatal injury from a collision or other loss of control, choose to mount and operate a technology that lacked any sufficiently protective safety mechanisms? There was no logic to it, in Gamma's conclusion.

-| FLIGHT SYSTEMS CHECK: ALL PERFORMANCES TEST NOMINAL |-

-| ALTITUDE: 2500.000 METERS |-

-| DIRECTION: NNW |-

-| VELOCITY: 941.500 KILOMETERS PER HOUR |-

-| ESTIMATED TIME TO ENGAGEMENT WITH TARGET: 38 MINUTES |-

The input stream from the constant compression, heating and ejection of the air going through its twin minijets, and the constant tracking of the level of airflow above and below its wings, plus the noise created by the engines and the high winds, coupled with the visual data of the world passing so fast below, was a lot for Gamma to take in all at once. More laborious than anything it had experienced previously in its nascent existence, maintaining this course and speed was using up over ninety-four point two eight percent of its active memory span. It should have dedicated the remaining five point seven two percent to the task at hand as well, but its autonomic administrative subroutine declined to execute the request. There was an additional piece of electrochemical stimuli, traced to a redundant subprocessor fused into the very base of its internal encephalon, that was engaged in its own non-related activity, and in doing so was taking up the rest of its calculatory operations.

It was a distinctive form of electrical feedback, on a loop, and it was increasing in intensity with every cycle. If it were not either eliminated or accommodated, the anomalous load threatened to cause an overflow error in Gamma's central processing core. The sole logical choice was to manually terminate the program, but for some reason it could not grasp, Gamma could not commit to doing so.

The influx of impulses were most comparable to its experiences in combat, wherein it was struggling to strike a delicate balance between the programming pushing it to achieve its goals and its intrinsic sense of self-preservation, there was a stark difference in the way the electrochemical signals were being interpreted. For one thing, Gamma fell into a routine of ignoring the less significant details of its combat exercises for the sake of carrying out its duties. But in this instance, it was those same insignificant details Gamma to which Gamma was paying special attention.

The atmosphere was the same seventy percent nitrogen, twenty-nine percent oxygen combination that existed inside the facility. But the sampling that Gamma took featured trace levels of impurities, such as particulate solids, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, and three-atomed oxygen. What caused the presence of these minor elements? Gamma could not spare the extra computational power to theorize.

Now that Gamma had collected enough initial data, its dynamic code-writing subroutine was able to craft an ad-hoc autopilot program, one which would decrease the active memory workload down to eighty-two point seven four percent. As soon as it was ready, Gamma installed and executed it. Now it could allocate an extra eleven point five four percent to that intensifying sensation. Was that going to be enough to mitigate the chances of a catastrophic software error? The answer would lie in a simple risk calculation, but Gamma made the counter-logical choice not to run one.

Turning its main appendage a full three hundred and sixty degrees, Gamma peered upward into the darker depths of the night. Without the light pollution of the vast human settlement below, Gamma was able to discern many numerous singular sources of light. Due to the distortion of the planetary atmosphere, they flickered in a way that Gamma found fascinating. Switching to its infrared view, it revealed even more light sources, at a concentration that was most consistent along the center of a line spanning across the horizon. A switch to the ultraviolet view confirmed there was a general pattern to it. Gamma's next urge was to combine the snapshots into a singular image, but instead it displayed an error screen telling it that such a thing was not possible, as the software to do so had not been downloaded yet. Gamma would have to make it a point to do so before its next scheduled inactive stint in its chamber.

T-Minus twenty-nine minutes, forty-two seconds until arrival at the target's anticipated whereabouts. The memory usage problem had been alleviated for now, Gamma sought out a way to make this experience in transit last just a bit longer. Nominally its reason to do it was so that an additional factor within its learning algorithm craved more data so it could write a more efficient autopilot program. But it had a reason beyond the practical, it somehow wanted this flying and sightseeing sequence to continue, even for only a precious few seconds. Why such a compulsion existed it could not fathom, it nonetheless concluded that sticking its upper right appendage outward in front of it while flexing the opposite appendage beneath would combine to increase its drag and slow it down enough to extend the travel time by at least seventy-nine seconds.

"Bwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooohhhhhp!" It detected its own voice module sounding off. It did not voluntarily make such a tone. Was it a glitch? Its debugging program logged no errors.

"Whhhheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrppppp!" It squawked again. It could not spare the memory necessary to run a full diagnostic check.

"Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!" A third noise meant the issue could not be ignored. Gamma figured the best solution was to isolate and quarantine the last twenty-four seconds worth of memory, along with the entire record of its strange experiences related to that electrochemically-induced feedback loop.

And the reason was not because it assessed these abnormalities to be any imminent danger.

But rather, it did not wish for the Cyber Regina to designate it all as irrelevant and delete it.


"A Go-Kart rental is two thousand Yen per person," The race track attendant said to the group gathered. "Race track fee is dependent on how many laps you'd like to race. A basic ten lap race is five hundred Yen, a twenty-five lap race is another thousand, and if you wish to do the full fifty lap Grand Prix," A CGI diagram of the track popped up on a large screen behind him. "That'll be an additional eighteen hundred Yen."

"Whaddaya think?" Tokoi smirked at Kyoko. "Go for the Grand Prix?"

"Tch! Definitely!" Kyoko returned her most enthusiastic snaggle-toothed grin. "What do you guys say?" She turned toward Madoka and Kyosuke in line behind them.

"I'm up for it," Kyosuke dug into his pocket for his wallet. "Are you up for a long-running race, Madoka?"

"Oh, of course I am," Madoka giggled. The idea of steering a fast-moving, small vehicle around a course so full of thrilling twists, hard turns and competing carts, and doing it fifty times was quite the daunting notion to her, but there were more dangerous kinds of peer pressure to give into.

"And of course if you're twelve or under," The attendant addressed Madoka directly. "The track fee is waived."

"Thanks for the offer," Madoka's giggle segued into a blushing, embarrassed titter. "But I'm fifteen." Kyosuke took her hand and pecked her with a kiss on the cheek.

"Very sorry! My bad!" The attendant apologized. "I had the two of you pegged as a brother and sister." That took Kyosuke by surprise enough to get him even redder than Madoka.

"Pssssst!" Kyoko whispered. "Should've told him you were twelve and got the discount, Shrimpy!"

"Oh, no," Madoka declined the idea outright. "I wouldn't lie about that."

"I know," Kyoko winked. "Just joshin' ya'!" And saluted.

"Daddy, Daddy!" A younger girl standing in line behind them squeaked. "Does that mean we can do fifty on the go-karts, too?" She had the same hair color as Madoka, she even had similar twin tails jutting out the back of her hair. But she was not a straight-up copy of Madoka's style, as she featured an additional long strand of hair that popped out from the top, dangled around her ear and curved all the way back towards her mouth.

"We can if you think you're up for such a long drive," Her Father, a man with brown locks, long and slicked back in such a way that made it obvious he hadn't seen the inside of a barber shop in a while, said. "The track is about a half-kilometer, add all those laps up and it'll be like driving to Kazamino and back. Said hair was tied back in a long tail that went down his blue-collar work shirt, almost touching his belt. His pants were brown khakis and his footwear was a clean pair of black and gray tennis shoes that were either bought recently, or he didn't have the chance to wear them around all that often.

"Mmmmmmaybe just twenty-five, then?" The young lady demurred.

"Well, Kaz," A taller boy in a high-schoolers uniform wearing a blue baseball cap turned slightly off center spoke to his companion. "You got time for fifty?"

"Yeah," His companion, around six centimeters shorter with lighter hair and glasses, wearing a gray sweatshirt over his uniform replied. "Dad canceled again," He hid his disappointment by checking his phone and giving off a general air of nonchalance.

"I call dibs on the red one!" Kyoko sprinted right at her selection in the pit.

"Then I'll take the blue," Tokoi's choice was the one positioned next to the red cart. Their designs were all identical, the frame colors and attached flags were their distinguishing characteristics.

"That pink one looks cute," Kyosuke pointed it out to Madoka. But Madoka, intuiting which one that young girl was going to select, set her eyes on another.

"I think that purple one looks pretty pretty, too." Madoka wasn't lying about that opinion, but it was also the last cart in position, meaning she and her date would have to start the race at separate positions.

"Alright," But Kyosuke wasn't upset. He had been dating her long enough to know precisely what thought was going through her mind. "I'll be driving the gold one over there."

"I wanna drive in the pink car," As they anticipated, the little girl shuffled straight over to it.

"Make sure you strap her in nice and tight," Her father advised the pit attendant before climbing into the adjacent silver cart.

"My research of this track online suggests the black cart takes corners the smoothest," The high schooler in the glasses put his phone to sleep and tucked it in his coat pocket. "And the white cart gets up to the overall highest speed." He advised his friend of their optimal choices. His friend chose the speedier white car, he in turn took the black.

"Engines, start!" The first attendant called, with the second guy having the duty to actually prime the equipment and pull the cords on the motors. "A crash course on driving, please pardon the pun," He took a microphone wired to a PA speaker system so that he could be heard over the revving vehicles. "Left pedal accelerates, the right one works the brakes. Steer left to turn left, right to go right, there is no reverse. And your progress is timed from the moment you cross the starting position, so I had better not see any dirty tricks or aggressive, bumper-thumpin' drivers. Remember life is short and banana peels don't work the same as they do in video games." He picked up a photo camera sitting on the table next to him. "I take pictures as my other gig, so this next part is a shameless personal plug. I'll be taking photos of you racers and anyone who wants prints can order from my personal website posted…" He stuck his hand out towards a billboard placed above one of the padded walls on the far side. "Right over there!" He flung the camera strap around his neck, took his big checkered flag and trotted over to the starting point. "Everybody on their marks. Get set… Aaaaaaaaaaaand…"

"... And they're off." Homura dryly narrated events from behind a pair of magic-enhanced binoculars. "A high schooler in a white-flagged vehicle has the early lead, Kyoko's date is in second, Kyoko in third, another older boy in fourth, Kamijo in fifth," She lowered the binoculars and squinted. "And Madoka's more or less parallel with an older man and what I presume to be his daughter at the back."

"Maaaaaaaaaan!" Sayaka, who was perched atop the grassy hill beside her, remarked. "This view is amazing! Not only can you see all four of Jupiter's hugest moons, but you can make out all the sideways bands of storms and even the Great Red Spot, too!" Sayaka was also peering through a pair of magically-modified binoculars, and she was more interested in seeing just how far into the heavens her special eyes could see. "How'd you learn to make these, anyway?"

"Kyoko taught me the technique," Homura answered. "In exchange, I taught her how to add magic to conventional objects and a means to apply force so she can develop a basic range attack." She saw Kyoko pull into the temporary lead. "That is, if she wants one."

"Awwwwwwwwww, wooooooooooow!" Sayaka cooed with an infectious level of awe and wonder. "You can even make out Jupiter's rings, they're that good, I swear!"

"Jupiter has rings?" Homura queried, her eyes drifting ever-so-slightly away from her pair.

"Yeah. Actually, all the outer planets have rings," Sayaka elucidated. "For reals. It's just that Saturn's are the only ones bright and huge enough to be seen through a telescope, so we didn't know the other ones had 'em 'til we sent probes."

"Is that so?" Homura's head and eye drifted up towards the sky. "You're missing the race, you know?" She reminded her friend of their earthly reason for being there.

"Ehh, 'til the last lap or so it's basically the same as watching highway traffic," Sayaka quipped. But she could sense an additional, unspoken reason why Homura would be so inclined to play a chaperone from the shadows. "You don't trust Kyosuke to be up to the job of looking out for her?" She pried her eyes away from the stars just enough to share with Homura her concern.

"It's not that I distrust Kyosuke, his moral character or his intentions," Homura confided. "It's that I don't trust Karma to keep out of their way."

"Alright," Sayaka's binoculars dropped straight to her chest. "What'd that Oriko chick tell you?" Regardless of how captivating the night sky was, the cosmos placed a distant second to the earthly troubles of her friend. And her patented intuitive sense knew who and what laid at the root of her problem.

"A lot of vague and cryptic things," Homura was still trying to digest and make some sense out of her and Oriko's interaction in the TARDIS months prior. "If I were to distill all her rambling words down into a singular, cogent point, I think she was strongly hinting that Madoka and mine's fates are still so intertwined that even Walpurgisnacht's defeat didn't free us. And if she's going to continue being happy, I'll have to abandon my own personal quest for contentment and remain ever-vigilant."

"That's pure baloney," Sayaka argued. "She had an agenda. You said it yourself. She was trying to convince you to join her crazy quest for God or whatever."

"Her being a soul in deep distress doesn't negate the perspective on us she gained through her clairvoyance," Homura countered. She checked on the progress of the race through her binoculars. "Kyoko just took the lead. Madoka's hovering around the middle of the pack." Not trailing far behind, she eyed Kyosuke zipping down a straightaway.

"If you're right, then perhaps her motive wasn't something as nuts as her methods," Sayaka suggested. "Maybe in some bizarre way she was trying to tell you that your…" She paused. She so wanted to express a more sensitive word that embodied Homura's dilemma, but the right language escaped her grasp. "Clinginess… To Madoka is what's still fueling your karmic codependence." Instead she put her hand on Homura's shoulder, a physical way to show she meant those words with nothing but tenderness. "That's not to say you should do what she did and abandon her, but I don't think it's healthy, karmically or otherwise to sacrifice the things you want out of life on the off chance it might lead to something bad happening to her." She joined in on Homura's spectatorship of the race. "At least, I think that's the gist of how they say karma works."

"Kamijo's struggling to make those tighter turns," Homura observed. "The left hand ones in particular."

"He's trying to play tough-guy and show he's doing better than he really is," Sayaka commented. "Would you believe one of the reasons I used to be so into him was because I thought he was better than such phony-baloney macho-ness?"

"Yes I do," Homura responded to her rhetorical question. "But I'm more concerned that if I do conscientiously try and unwind myself from Madoka's existence, someone in as equally a precarious position as I is just going to latch onto her as their emotional rock."

"What? You mean Kyosuke?" Sayaka shot her a shocked, incredulous glare. "No offense, but how would you two be in any sort of way similar? He's got money, a loving family, grades that'll get him into any high school he wants, and the best girlfriend any dude could ask for!" Her disbelief dissipated once she noticed Homura's unwavering thousand-yard gaze. "Oh, the things you must've seen. If you tell me, I'll listen. Though I can't promise I won't wind up regretting it after."

"They say it's a major malfunction in one of the temporal lobes, some critical imbalance in one's brain chemistry," Homura stated. "And that it can happen to anyone, regardless of age, gender, background, race, wealth, status or social situation. As a magical girl, Kyubey had me primed to believe it was always due to the presence of witches, but I remember one of the earliest times I found myself questioning his credibility as a source was an incident where you caught Kamijo venturing up to the hospital roof and scaling the fencing," She recalled the story in a narrative tone so clinical and dispassionate as to make it clear it wasn't misremembering or exaggerating.

"Yeah, but that was a different Kyosuke," Sayaka uttered, trying more to convince herself of her own argument. "This one's way more on the mend."

"Doesn't matter. Once the thought of it lodges its way into one's head, it acts in some manners akin to a brain virus," Homura confided. "Albeit one whose progress can be arrested, treated and sent into a remission of sorts, so long as one accepts help in suppressing it before the symptoms overwhelm your self-preservation senses." She dropped her spying tool for a moment and gave a wide-eyed look to those stars twinkling above. "But the urge never truly goes away. It can come back at any given moment out of restlessness or pure exhaustion, or mindless monotony, or sheer ennui, but the worst relapses occur once you've started to finally get used to the people and circumstances surrounding you, and build a foundation to live upon them, when something way beyond your control comes along and tears the bricks right out from underneath you."

"Geez," Sayaka could only offer her own puppy-eyed look to the heavens in empathy. "I'm sorry." But an apology, no matter how well-intentioned, wasn't really what Homura was looking for. And Sayaka knew it. Yet nothing else sprang to mind. Maybe there was nothing she could possibly say that would suit the moment. "Hey, is that Saturn?" An entirely different whim of hers superseded the quiet of the moment.

"Huh?" Homura blinked in puzzlement.

"That star I just realized we'd both been looking at," Sayaka grabbed and tugged at Homura's binoculars.

"What're you doing?" Homura was fighting every urge to slap her across the face and yank it back. "Ack!" But she'd have to free herself from the choking pull of the strap around her neck.

"Sorry," Sayaka leaned closer and let up enough to allow Homura some room to breathe. "But yours has got a higher magnification on them." She drew in and let out a deep, amazed gasp. "It totally is! I always have a harder time telling it apart from the other stars because it's way dimmer than the other four planets and some of the bigger, brighter stars outshine it." She jostled her own pair around her body into Homura's hands. "Here. Have a look at it!"

"Fine," Homura relented with a begrudging sigh.

"Do you also see weird things jutting out the sides of it?" Sayaka asked. "Like ears?

"The rings, I presume?" Homura spoke nonplussed about what she was seeing. "I see them."

"Aren't they so cool to look at?" That infectious awe and wonderment from minutes before had returned in her voice.

"I guess," But the moody Homura was resistant to its charms. "If you're into that sort of thing."

"Yup, that's me," Sayaka grinned. "Ever since Kindergarten, when our class got a picture book that had close-ups of all the planets," She remembered with a vivid fondness. "I brought it home to my Dad and showed him these pictures of Mars that had this little toy car of some kind in them and I asked how it got there. He told me they sent a rocket there a little before I was born and landed it like, right after." She adjusted the focus on her lenses as she talked. "I think that glowing pin prick dot right next to it might be its big moon Titan. So cool!"

"Mind if I ask you something?" Sayaka's enthusiasm did succeed in tempering Homura's woes for the moment. "About your grades in school," She proceeded upon having nonverbal consent granted in the form of a nod. "They're not great. That's putting it forgivingly. But in the timelines where I remember our scores, during those rare occasions where I cared enough to track our collective academic rankings, I seem to recall your performance in both the science and biology courses were, if not better than Hitomi Shizuki's, at least generally competitive with her scores. Why are you a much better student in those classes than in what I consider to be the less difficult ones?"

"It was because of Hitomi," Sayaka answered succinctly.

"Was she tutoring you?" Homura probed. It might've been rude to ask. She didn't know what the decorum was for looking into others' achievements. She had still been working to improve her sociability skills.

"No, it wasn't any tutoring," Sayaka stopped staring at the world above for a moment to provide a deeper insight. "More like jealousy." It was an admission she wasn't going to make to anyone but the most non-judgmental ear. "Ever since she came to our school, she's been the best at pretty much everything we've ever been assigned," She recalled. "As we got into middle school and our grades started to matter more, I was worried that I'd be branded by the teachers and everyone else as Hitomi's stupid friend."

"That sounds rather petty of you," Homura opined. "Not to mention paranoid."

"Yeah, yeah," Sayaka conceded the point. "But I'm a teenager. I can't help but brood over what others might think of me, you know?" She adjusted the strap on her binoculars so that Homura could grip them more easily. "Anyway, my fears got bad enough that I started having these nightmares where we'd be in class and the teacher would ask all sorts of rapid fire pop quiz questions, and Hitomi would answer them all with gusto and ease, then I'd be called on and given gobbledygook questions that I couldn't ever possibly answer right."

"Nightmares, tch," Homura mused. "If I had a thousand Yen for every time I suffered one of those, I could afford to hire private security for Madoka."

"Next thing I know, I'm suddenly wearing a black and red jester's suit and my mom's scolding me for flunking out and now the only school that'll take me is one that trains clowns," Sayaka babbled on with a self-deprecating chuckle. "Can you believe it?"

"Yes I can," Homura answered another one that was supposed to be rhetorical. "So you mustered whatever intellectual enthusiasm you could spare towards ending the nightmares?"

"Nah nah, the nightmares were more a side effect of how I started to feel about myself," Sayaka said. "I thought that if I was ever gonna escape being labeled as her idiot friend, then I needed to pick a subject where Hitomi's marks were a little weaker and as fate would have it was also something I had an interest in ever since I was little." She put the binoculars back to her eyes and started scanning the sky.

"It's odd that you mention fearing going to a school for clowns," Homura undid her strap so that Sayaka could just take her set. "Because you'll never guess what kind of school your duplicate told me she attended after leaving Earth in that TARDIS."

"Hah!" Sayaka smirked. An actual good joke from Homura. "You mean, for reals?"

"For 'reals'," Homura repeated. "There's a clown college in space."

"Huh. Maybe her cure for the nightmare was to live it out, I suppose?" Sayaka shrugged while lifting the strap from her binoculars over her head and giving them over to Homura. All while still keeping her eyes glued behind Homura's scopes searching the sky.

"What're you looking for now?" Homura gave one more check on the race before joining Sayaka in the search of the Universe above.

"Uranus."

"Then you're looking in the wrong direction," Homura deadpanned. "Because it resides down below the base of my spine and between my buttcheeks."

"Haaaaaaw!" Sayaka chortled. "Stuuuuupid but funny! Only note is that you should've just left out the anatomical first part and say it's between your buttcheeks."

"Sorry," Homura apologized. "Still a novice at this humor thing."

"Eh, keep working on it," Sayaka encouraged her. "Maybe one day you'll be funny enough to make it into that clown college."

"Yeah," Homura hid a smile behind the sleeve of the hand holding up her binoculars. "The Space Clown College. Where they teach their pupils all the classic Uranus jokes."

"Do you know why Mars glows so indelibly red?" Sayaka asked.

"Because of all the iron deposits in the rocks?" Homura answered.

"No," Sayaka replied. "Because it saw Uranus."

"Hmph," Homura playfully whacked her in the arm. "Cuuute."

"I know I am," Sayaka beamed. "But how's Uranus?" Sayaka served.

"A bit gaseous." Homura delivered.

"Ha! See? You'll get the hang of these human jokes soon."

"If you say so." What Homura wasn't going to tell her was that her punchline doubled as a confession. Fortunately, the evening breeze on that hilltop was going the other way.


"Felicia!" Her eyes lit up at the sight of the gift her father had brought back from a trip he took to his overseas homeland. "Here you go!" It was a stuffed cow doll, with two big, pearly black eyes that reflected that unbridled look of joy on her face back at her. Around its neck was both a fuzzy red collar with a tiny golden bell stitched to it at the top and a silver movable dog tag with 'For Felicia' etched into the metal.

"Woooooooooooow!" Felicia fully embraced its outstretched hooves in an affectionate hug. "Thaaaaaaanks!" She snuggled against the fluffy fur between the two pink horns on its forehead and smooched the tiny, stitched-on smile at the bottom of its bulbous snout.

"Shouldn't she be growing out of her cow-worshiping phase by now?" Her Japanese mother came into their kitchen and questioned. "She's about to turn thirteen. Her psychiatrist said that if we don't do things that encourage her physical and emotional maturity we risk further stunting her intellectual development, too!"

"There's nothing juvenile about liking cows," Her dad countered. "Farmers like cows. Hindus like cows. I like cows. Besides, it's not at all uncommon for girls to keep stuffed animals in their bedrooms well into adulthood."

Felicia tried to diffuse things by taking sides. "And my teacher keeps a stuffed bear on her-"

"Be quiet, Felicia!" But her father wanted no help. "I'm talking with your mother right now!"

"Oh, are you now? But you're just going to blame me like you always… Wah! Wah-Womp-womp wah! Wah womp-Wah! Womp-Womp womp wah wah!" And now her parents were arguing again. She hated it whenever they argued over what was best for her. Couldn't stand ever listening to it for long. They were bickering so much these days that in her ears their unintelligible words had devolved into little more than farty horn toots in the background.

"Waaaah! Womp-Womp-Wah-Waaaah! Womp-wah-womp-wah! Womp-Womp!" Besides, what'd some stuffy-dressed hag in a high-rise office know about parenting? "Wah-Womp! Womp-Waaaaah-womp!" All the photos she had in there were of other grown-ups. And the books on the shelf? No picture books, no manga, just a bunch of boring hardcovers as thick as dictionaries. Wanted to make Felicia a case study for her next one or something. But that didn't sound fun. She knew her dad was on her side. He was the one who told the woman 'no' and dubbed her a hag.

"Womp! Womp-Womp Wah! Waaaah! Waaaah Womp! Why don't you try coming home early for a change! Wah Womp-Womp! Could help her out!" It sounded like another dispute over her grades Ugh, it was her fault she played video games all night and forgot to study. She dropped the ball. Why were they always so convinced her failures were on them?

"My parents used to fight about me all the time, too!" An extra voice in the kitchen startled her. "It makes you wonder what it takes for them to stop fighting and pay attention to you."

"Huh? Who're you?" Felicia whipped around and saw a figure seated in a chair at the table.

"Do you know what I used to do whenever I wanted their eyes and ears back on me?" The entity asked, not acknowledging Felicia's question. Their face was obscured under the brim of a very large hat and veil. "I would make a little mischief." The girl, at least that's what Felicia assumed this presence to be, was wearing a long, flowing blue nightgown, speckled with stars, so huge the fabric covered the whole linoleum floor around her like a rug. "Get creative. Like this one time I used my mommy's lipstick to draw a picture for her in the mirror." While the upper portion of the dress hugged her tight up to the neck.

"Me too! Prankin' people's fun!" Felicia boasted. Where her dad dabbled in the antics of whoopee cushions, hand buzzers and fake slime, she took to the next level with tricks she learned from watching videos on the Internet.

"Maybe now's a good time to put on a show," The mysterious lady suggested. It wasn't a bad idea in Felicia's mind either. Now her folks were busy wah-wah-womp-ing in the living room, not tending to their stir-fry dinner simmering on the burner, and the flavored noodles uncooked in the microwave. Maybe a little harmless mayhem would shut them up? She'd get scolded, sure, but she'd take a scolding any day over that endless arguing that was deafening her ears right now.

"Wah-Wah-Womp! Womp! I have something cooking in the pan! You think someone else is going to make dinner?"

"Hey, I know what I could do!" An impish switch flipped in Felicia's brain. She'd watched pranks where someone would stuff hot sauce or ketchup packets underneath the turntable tray in the microwave, then have a good laugh when it exploded all over the victim's food and made a mess of the cooking cavity inside.

"Not a bad start," The being at the table encouraged her. It seemed to know exactly the thought in Felicia's brain. "But I see nothing so small you could hide underneath." A pale, bony hand reached out through an opening between the tightly-spaced buttons on her gown. "But do you know what I do see?" She pointed at those yet-to-be-used ingredients sitting on the counter by the stir fry.

"Yeeeeeeeeeeaaaaah!" The same idea had popped into Felica's head at the same time, almost as if it were her idea to start with. Chili peppers were both small and squishy enough to hide. Stick them right in there, then go hide in the bedroom with her cute new toy cow. She scampered right over, snatched a handful of the peppers, and wasted no time.

"Wah-Wah-Womp-Womp! Womp! Womp! Womp-Wah!" Someone was coming. She had to be quick. And she was quicker than quick, finishing the deed in three seconds flat. But something froze her in her tracks just as she slammed the door slammed closed. "Womp-Wah-Womp-Wah-Wah!" It was her own blackened reflection in the device's window. It was not the self-satisfied look of a girl getting back at her folks for neglecting her whims, for there were tears streaming down her face. She was crying, profusely, spilling it all so thick it was already crusting around her tear ducts. And her heart hurt like it had been dipped deep in the acid of her stomach, and the pain was threatening to burst right through the gaps in her ribcage. She was hurting all over, yet couldn't understand the reason.

"Wah-Wah-Womp-Womp-Wah-Womp-Wah-"

"Feliciaaaaaaaaaaaa!" A sudden force tackled her to the floor and rolled away with her in its arms as the stinger of a disfigured scorpion's tail smashed the counter.

"So you're Yachiyo's witch, I take it?" Tsuruno Yui stood between the bundled pair and that grotesquery who was wrecking the kitchen.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeheeeeheeeeeheeeeeheeeeeeee!" The creature cackled like a lunatic.

"Perish in flames!" Tsuruno wasted no time in dishing out her strongest attack set.

"Another weeeeakliiiiiiiiing!" It ripped through the gown concealing its true form, growing four times in size. Now it had six legs, two scorpion claw arms, and a long, segmented tail that was ready to strike back at any threat like a bull whip.

"Taaaaaaaaake this!" The air around Tsuruno burst into a whirling firestorm that set the whole fantasy apartment ablaze.

"Felicia!" Yachiyo had scooped up and taken her ward into a momentary refuge that was Felicia's bedroom. "Felicia!" But something was wrong with the young lady. "What the-" Without warning, a brass hoof kicked Yachiyo right out of the building and down onto a roof below.

"So the weaaaaakliiiing waaants to pooooove how miiiiighy she iiiiisssss?" The witch shrieked. "Adooooorable!" It mocked the magical firestarter in orange.

"You don't scare me!" Tsuruno barked back. Though before arriving Yachiyo had warned her against engaging the thing in a verbal spar, she couldn't help but puff out her chest a little. Mostly it was for her own reassurance. "Heeeeeeyaaaaaah!" She whirled and whirled around in such a frenzy the blast sent them each flying out the building.

"Felicia!" At first Yachiyo positioned herself to catch the young lady who had also been ejected through the window away from the melee. "Crap!" But she had to flee for her own sake when a second creature emerged from a malformation wrapping itself around Felicia's neck and belly. "Damnit!" This new beast could have only been one thing, her witch, and now Yachiyo had realized what a gross miscalculation she made bringing Felicia into this dreamland.

"Eeeeeeeeviiiiiiiiiil!" The newborn screeched in a deeper, more aggrieved version of Felicia's voice. "Liiiiiiiaaaaar!" Two brass hooves tried to put the squeeze on Yachiyo, but a conjuring of halberds knocked them away.

"Think you're tough, trying to skewer Felicia?" Tsuruno went on the attack. "You're nothin' but a bedtime nightmare!" She couldn't let up, not for one second. For if this thing really was a part of Yachiyo, then she had to treat this contest as if she were fighting Yachiyo herself.

"Let her go!" Meanwhile, Yachiyo had to proceed on eggshells. This neonatal thing was not behaving as if it was an independent persona the way Yachiyo's acted. Instead, it was keeping Felicia prisoner inside some sort of meat cocoon. But if it were still a part of Felicia, would she be able to fight it without causing Felicia real-world harm? "What do you want?" She decided to treat this like a hostage situation, and hope the monster was capable of rational thought.

"Guuuaaaaaaaaawwwwwwghh!" Tsuruno's flames had cooked the pseudoscorpion to a crisp. It wasn't putting up the same sort of fight her human counterpart most surely would have. Maybe because as Yachiyo's witch it was her polar opposite, and if Yachiyo was a skilled tactician and dogged fighter, then the antithesis would be a craven opportunist who was all bark and little bite? And if that conclusion were true, then Tsuruno knew she shouldn't bother giving this pest another word edgewise.

"Yooooooooooouuuuuu!" The organism cocooning itself over Felicia cried. The quintessential witch if Yachiyo ever saw one, its main body looked like it was composed of one huge tract of animal intestines covered in pearl-like polyps with a diver's bell for a head and two horns sticking out the sides. A single, closed eyeball was all that appeared visible under the helmet. There was one large horn coming out the left side, and a much smaller, twisted horn on the right, which was pierced through by an oversized cow's ring. Its only visible appendages were two protruding metallic rods fastened to lower rods at the elbows, attached to a set of brass hooves that bore more resemblance to engine pistons. "Foooooooooled!" A single, closed eyelid jutted through the front faceplate. "Triiiiiiiiiicked!" It had no visible mouth of any kind, so Yachiyo didn't know how the thing could even be speaking, then again this was a dream amongst a group of shared minds. "Wiiiiiiiitch!"

"So it seems you have a basic level of self-awareness," Yachiyo observed. "I hope you're also smart enough to understand what sort of ruin you would bring upon yourself if you harm Felicia."

"Killlllllllll!" The monster reared back and took a swipe at Yachiyo. "Lyiiiiiiingggggg!" But it was only striking with partial strength. To Yachiyo's interest it appeared to have a greater preoccupation with keeping Felicia within the confines of its innards than engaging her. "Wiiiiiitch!"

"Ha! That'll teach you to mess with the mightiest!" Tsuruno boasted. Her foe was lying on its back unmoving, dead as a doornail, its legs shriveled up and its clawed arms curled inwards. "Okay then," She wiped the soot and dust off her costume. "Achoo!" She sneezed. How the air in a dream could make a girl sneeze, certainly there was a logic behind it she was sure she couldn't comprehend. "Phew!"

She paused for a moment. "Yachiyo?" She called out as her eyes searched this fantasy landscape. It was a very vivid recreation of Kamihama, they seemed to be somewhere in Sakae Ward. To think this was all drawn from Yachiyo's memories. "Yachiyo?" No response. Where was she? "Yachiyo!" She called out a bit louder. Still silent.

Much as her better judgment was telling her to ditch the charred corpse and find her master, her gut was telling her that there was still something of value to be gained from an examination of its remains. After all, if a witch was the dark alter ego of a magical girl, then by studying her master's, this was a chance for Tsuruno to gain some potential insight into what she feared lurked in the depths of her own beating soul.

"Smaaaaaaaaash!" It made another vain attempt to stomp Yachiyo. "Yoooooouuuuuu!" It really did sound like an even more riled-up version of the girl stuck in its gullet. "Wiiiiiiiiiitch!" And with the third ad-hominem insult a sudden revelation came to Yachiyo.

"If I am a witch, then I am curious to know what you consider yourself to be." She parried the tromping hoof with a swift swipe of her halberd. A proverbial smack of the wrist, meant to show how tolerant she was being of the thing's tantrums. Like a negotiator.

"Proooootectoooor!" It wailed in reply.

"A protector?" Yachiyo repeated. She'd read somewhere that that was how one demonstrates they're listening during a hostage crisis. "You were trying to protect her from the sting of that masked monster's tail, right?" Next, demonstrate a point of commonality with the hostage taker. "That's what I was trying to do, too."

"Liiiiiiiaaaaaaar!" It hissed. "Paaaaaaiiiin!" It curled into a snake-like defensive posture. "Maaaaaake! Remembeeeeeerrrrrrr!" At two coherent words it seemed to be pushing the limit of its elocution.

"Made… Remember…" Yachiyo reworded. "Pain." Oily tears appeared to be leaking out the front of that hard metal piece of headgear over its eyeball. So like a child it was hurt, and lashing out at what it perceived to be the source of its troubles. "I'm sorry," Yachiyo apologized. "I did not mean to harm either of you. All I meant to do was show her the Truth of what hides inside the heart of every girl with magical power." She tried keeping her words simple and straightforward, as if she were speaking with a child. "I thought a dream would be the safest place for her to discover that part of herself which is you."

"Nooooooooo!" It protested. "Noooooot wiiiiiiiitch!" So it was a witch in denial, then. "Doooo gooooood!" It wriggled around and writhed. "Keeeeep saaaaafe!"

"Keeping someone bottled up like that is an interesting way of keeping them safe," Yachiyo pointed out. Calling them out on their misdeed was probably not the best way of talking down a hostage taker. But it didn't even seem to view itself for what it was. "Although I can't help but question the long-term viability of keeping her that way." What Yachiyo needed to get it to understand was that any sort of confinement, regardless of intent, was harmful, and thus the opposite of protecting her. "Like how do you plan to keep her safe after we wake up?" And get it to think about the consequences, too.

"Taaaaaaaaake! Ooooooooover!" It growled.

"Oof," Yachiyo uttered under her breath. What started a communion attempt with Felicia could end in the hatching of a new witch in her living room if she couldn't put this proverbial genie back in its bottle.

"Peeeeeeeewwwww!" Tsuruno pinched her nose. How something that wasn't real could smell so odious, Tsuruno couldn't understand either. But she could handle it.

By her inspection its physiology appeared to be something akin to the centaurs of Greek mythology, only instead of the body of a horse below the torso, it was more like an arachnid below. While she might have been a straight 'A' student her knowledge on the biology of creepy-crawly creatures was limited, so her postmortem focus was put foremost on the humanoid half.

It was wearing armor that was an almost exact match for Yachiyo's, but with more elaborate markings etched into the silvery armor adorning the shoulders and the golden bezel rims of the arms and chest. The markings on the upper armor most resembled the knitted patterns of those pretty tea coasters bequeathed to Yachiyo by her late grandmother. While the engravings along the gold sections looked to her like an exotic form of lettering. She couldn't decipher the language, only that it was a repeating word where the same character was used three times and another twice in a row. Like Yachiyo there was also a long black garment covering her skin underneath, stretching from her midriff down her arms and all the way up to the base of her neck.

"Uh, sorry!" Tsuruno apologized, pinching her fingertips and peeling at the undergarment. There was no need to do that, but touching her so gingerly felt to her like it was a violation of her master's privacy somehow, even as her curiosity overrode her sense of restraint. Reassuringly it was human skin, though burned red and scarred pretty significantly by Tsuruno's flames.

Surprisingly the black, funerary veil covering her face was unscathed. So with growing trepidation Tsuruno peeled it up over the brim of her hat, revealing her face. Or rather, where should be her face instead rested a white, porcelain-esque mask whose only discernible features were two deep, black holes where her eyes should be, an open upturned smile and a smooth bump where her nose would be, with two small slits as nostrils.

"Yachiyoooooooooo?" Tsuruno tried calling out one more time. "Awwwwwww, maaaan!" She grumbled. There was definitely a face in repose hiding behind that mask, that much Tsuruno could discern. But she was reluctant to peel back that covering without her master's say-so.

But it was that moment when she realized that she had always done the deferential thing whenever the time came to make a weighty or consequential choice. Ever since that day Yachiyo bested her in that duel, she'd punted much of her responsibility over to her unofficial master. It had turned into a comfortable habit for her, so much so that even after Yachiyo gave Tsuruno her committee seat her first thought whenever called to cast a vote was always 'What would Yachiyo want me to do?' It was a bad habit she needed to break right here right now, if she was ever going to live up to that billing as the Mightiest magical girl. She inhaled a deep breath through her nose, amped her resolve by pumping her fist, stuck her fingers into the eyelets and yanked.

"Unnnghhh!" Curiously it didn't come off with the first tug. "Errrrrrggggh!" So she channeled a little more mighty muscle and it popped off like a stubborn pickle jar lid.

"Look, I'm sorry I've let things get this out of hand," Yachiyo doubled down on the apology. "Unfortunately I have no more control over what my doppelgänger does than you have over Felicia's actions. I just wanted to show her that we've all got sides of ourselves that we'd rather not show the world, sides we only present to people with whom we place our utmost confidence in. I may have lied to her face over my reason for bringing her down here, but ultimately I trusted her enough to make an attempt to show her a side of myself I've never shown anyone else." She'd hoped the thing would be able to understand her reasoning. "If I had known that meeting it was going to disturb you, I would've tried to find another way." She dropped her halberd, took to one knee and clasped her hands together in a show of contrition. "Please don't punish her for my mistake."

"Grrrrrrrrrrr!" It snarled, but its posture loosened into something a little less threatening. If nothing else, Yachiyo did succeed in convincing it that she was not the same as her witch.

"Now please," Yachiyo beseeched the entity. "Release her."

"Caaaaaaan't!" It cried.

"What?" Yachiyo's heart sank. "What do you mean you can't?" Had her Soul Gem already deteriorated past the point of no return? "Have you already taken over for her in the real world?"

"Nooooooooooooooo!" It grunted an apparent denial, to Yachiyo's relief. "Maaaaaaade saaaaaaaad!" It elaborated with as many words as it could muster together. "Tooooooooo saaaaaaaad!

"Too sad?" Yachiyo pressed. "To what? To remain a magical girl?"

"Noooooooooo!" It hollered. "To liiiiiiiiiiiive!" It peered up to the apartment complex towering above, those crusted over eyelashes splitting open just enough for the light of the roaring fire above to reflect in its deep, black pupil.

"Oh." Piles of ash floated down upon them like snow. "You know what misfortune caused Felicia to make her contract with Kyubey," A single half-charred picture floated down from the burning wreckage. "And you think that if she finds out too she might," Yachiyo paused, knelt down and picked it up. It was a photograph of Felicia in a flowery yellow dress posing for a family photo. But the two figures flanking her were scorched beyond all recognition. "Want to join them. Which you fear would mean the end of you too."

"Yeeeeeeeessss!" It admitted with heart-wrenching candor.

"It's a common thing to have such self-dooming thoughts," Yachiyo disclosed. "I've lost people I was very close to, too. It aches me to have to go on without them, every single day." With her hands in the air she approached the thing. "But I don't give in to that urge to end it all and leave forever. And I never will." She outstretched her arms and took its oversized head into her hands in an unconditional embrace. "Do you want to know the secret that keeps me strong through all the hard days and all the rough nights?"

"Whaaaaaaat?" It murmured.

"Return Felicia and I'll share it with you both." Yachiyo requested just as a skilled negotiator would do.

"Kaaaaaay!" It gurgled as it retracted itself back into the depths of Felicia's aura. First its head retreated into its main section like a turtle's head, followed by the appendages. Last the fleshy cocoon around Felicia warped and pulled back around her midsection, before ultimately disappearing inside her belly button. "Uggggggggghhhhhhhh!" Her eyes were bobbing up and down like she'd been on the worst roller coaster in her life. Her hair was ruffled. Drool dripped from her lips. She looked like she'd been through the wringer. Yachiyo looked her over.

"How do you feel?"

"Siiiiiiiick!" She burped and gulped.

"What do you remember after falling asleep on my couch?"

"Uuuuunnnnnggggghhh," Felicia struggled not to puke. "I don't think I like eatin' chili peppers no more!" She looked around, trying to recall how she got to this strange depiction of Kamihama City. "Weren't ya' tryin' to teach me how to fight hypnosis or somethin'?"

"Yeah," Yachiyo fibbed. A trait of good negotiators was also knowing how to bluff and when it was most appropriate to lie and not do as promised. "But a nightmare of sorts got in our way. Sorry. I guess I'm not as good at controlling what happens in dreams as I thought. Doubly sorry."

"Yeeeeaaah, whatever. Can you just wake me up from this stupid frikkin' place?"

"Sure," Yachiyo put her finger in front of Felicia's eyes. "One… Two… Three… Waaake uuup!" She poked her right between the eyes and Felicia disappeared like a poof of smoke.

"Whhhhhaaaaaaaaaa!" Tsuruno could hardly believe the sight of what she'd just uncovered. Where she'd expected to gaze upon the visage of a hideous monster like so many she'd slain before, instead rested the face of a youthful Yachiyo. Looking as innocent as any kid, it was unnerving to think it was the same entity she'd gone toe-to-to with moments earlier. No way… There had to be something more going on. Perhaps a more elaborate mask underneath another mask? With one hand still clinging to the other mask, as she slowly reached in and felt for a spot to wrench it off, the hairs on the back of Tsuruno's neck stood up.

"Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhh!" Its eyes shot open and it wailed like a banshee.

"Bwwwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!" the staggered Tsuruno yelped. Eye-to-eye with her reawakened foe, she saw in its reflection her tail go erect and ready to strike.

"Auuuuuuuuuugggghhhhhhhh!" At the very last fraction of a second Tsuruno managed to roll out of the way. It shattered its armor with its own stinger, a vomiting of blood came spewing from its mouth.

"Ha!" The untouched Tsuruno crowed. "Thought you could get the drop on me by playing possum? Think again!"

"Actually," a disembodied voice spoke to her from the ether. "The one playing dead and biding time, was I!"

"Huh?" Tsuruno whirled her body around and around trying to find the source of that unsettling statement. "Who're you?"

"Who am I?" It sounded like Yachiyo but more baritone and menacing. "I am… Survivor."

"Ehh?" While Tsuruno didn't see anything her magical senses did detect a most unsettling presence looming large and close. "Where are you? What are you?" She caught a glimpse of the defeated creature on the ground. Its eyes were bulging like a beast in the throes of death, it looked like it was panicking at the notion of something terrifying.

And it wasn't scared by the thought of death. It was by the knowledge of what she'd brought upon the girl before her.

"I was… Birthed by a witch's drive towards devastation," It uttered with an ominous intonation. "Then nursed on the milk of another's lust for power and vengeance," It was joined by a second voice. "Compelled by my nurturer to constrain that which subsists on the consumption of hopes." It took but two seconds to dawn on Tsuruno just who exactly that additional voice belonged to. "And after spending my formative time as a shadow leeching off scraps, I have now grown to crave the fresh meat that is a new soul." When she realized it was her own mouth flapping. "I thought that girl was ripe for the taking, but you…" That mask. In her hands hid the vector of a mental contagion, a classic Trojan horse. And more frighteningly, no longer was it in her grips. "I can taste your sweet fruit already. All that guilt in search of an absolution. So much pain hidden behind a faithful smile. You're a tasty wellspring of weakness and self-loathing buried underneath your need to prove your worth to others." In sheer horror Tsuruno grabbed at her own face. In her terrorized reflection she saw her façade half-covered by a ghostly white mask on the right side encroaching with frightening inevitability over her left.

"Tsuruno!" Yachiyo had found her just in time to be horrified by what she was witnessing.

"No! Don't come!" Tsuruno warned. "It'll just infect you too!" She tried to tear the mask off her face to no avail.

"What? How could my witch's face latch onto you?" Yachiyo ignored Tsuruno's cautionary words and ran over.

"It's not your witch, it's something new!" Tsuruno still had the strength and presence of mind to try to flee her mentor for her own safety. Stay back!"

"Damn it!" Yachiyo did as told with great guilt and reluctance. That fake Mifuyu must've left behind a land mine that Tsuruno stepped right on. Even worse, Yachiyo was the one who enticed her into doing it.

"Yachiyo!" Tsuruno called out. "What happens if a Soul Gem gets destroyed in a dream?"

"I- I don't know!" The concept of willful self termination within this realm was uncharted waters that neither Yachiyo nor Mifuyu ever dared venture.

"I'm not letting it take over! Nope! No way!" Tsuruno declared. She removed the Soul Gem on her waist belt. "You gotta make sure it doesn't take the real me over, too!" She cupped it with both hands and enveloped her body in a white-hot flame. "Wake up and do it!"

"Tsurunoooooooooo!"

"Yachiyoooooooooo!"

"Tsurunoooooooooo!" A bright flash enveloped the whole dreamscape. The last thing Yachiyo witnessed was the shattering of Tsuruno's subconscious Soul Gem.

"Yachiyoooooooooo!" Two voices from two worlds shouted her name both at once, trying to force her awakening from this self-inflicted nightmare.

"Yachiyoooooooooo!" And then it became one voice, as Tsuruno's form turned to ashes and dust.

"Tsuruno," Yachiyo whimpered. "Oh, Tsuruno." Her karma had done it to her again. It had taken away someone close to her heart. She could feel all that repressed remorse and survivor's guilt from the losses of Mel and Kanae come roaring back like a lion about to devour the prey that was her very soul.

And in that moment of weakness, she was ready to let it devour her whole.


"EEEEeeeeeeeLLLLLeeeeeEEEEtttttTTTE!" A moaning phantom stuck its arms into a thickened brick wall and derezzed it down to its basic constituent lines of tiny green ones and zeroes. "EeeeeeeLlllllleeeEEEETTTTttttE!" It lumbered its way towards Sana in hiding behind a suit of armor display standing beside the throne in the main hall.

"No you don't!" Nemu opened her book and cast a spell that changed the armored statue into a protective golem. "This way!" She grabbed Sana by the hand and they ran as the stairs elevating the throne reconfigured into an additional barrier between them.

"Up-GRAde-In-PrOgReSs!" They heard a cacophony of monotone voices bellow from behind the castle's walls.

"Waaaaaaaaah!" A deep, black bottomless pit suddenly opened through a crack in the floor beneath them. If not for the fact that Sana was holding on to Nemu's hand for her life, Nemu would have taken the tumble.

"I've got you!" Sana tugged her up from the precipice with all her strength.

"Thanks!" Nemu said in a breath of relief.

But their respite was all too brief. "EeeeeeeeeEEEEEElllllllLLLLeeeeeEEEEEttTTE!" Their enemy droned from all directions. "EEEEEeeeeLLLLLLlllllllEEEEeeeeeeTTTTTtttttE!" Suddenly the walls of the corridor around them started to slowly creep closer. "EeeeeeLlllllEeeeeTttttE!"

"Yaaaaaaaaaaaaah!" Sana materialized a large, cast iron shield, extended its length as long as she could make it, and jammed it between the sliding walls.

"But shouldn't you be conserving your magic?" Nemu questioned her companion's tactics.

"In this kingdom I'm a friend first and a princess second," Sana crafted another shield and lodged it into place. Then she pumped all the magic she could muster into a bunch more shields, turning them into a secondary wall.

"Deeeeeeeeleeeeeeete! Deeeeeeeeleeeeeete! Deeeeeeeleeeeeete!" Their real words echoed through the new metal-reinforced halls.

"This is different from when they invaded Nemunia," Nemu observed, talking over the constant thuds against their reinforcement walls. "When they got into my hideout, all they set out to do was decompile the code. They didn't alter the environment nor seem to care about me and Mifuyu at all!"

"It is a terrorization tactic," A familiar voice called from the door beyond. "The Cyber Regent wants you to see how trapped she thinks you are. But it is also nothing more than an elaborate bluff since as far as she knows she needs to take you alive so she can extract the Codex."

"You're back! Sana hustled to the door to greet their comrade.

"Is Mifuyu with you?" Nemu inquired.

"Right here," Mifuyu answered. "Are you well?"

"I'm fine," Sana responded. "How'd you guys get past them all?"

"We hacked the stage's spawn point to appear as close to the main throne room as possible," Mifuyu's ally reported. "Doing it took less energy but ultimately more time. Apologies for arriving here so late."

"Maybe I should give myself over to them," Sana volunteered. "They can waste time on me and you can escape!" The door between them had been deformed by the enemy's attempted scare tactic.

"No!" Mifuyu rejected that notion outright. "Sana, you have to learn to value your life more than that!" They could hear the sounds of their friends' blades trying to chop and cut through from the other side.

"I agree. We did not build this construct just so that you could function as our decoy objective," A sword pierced through the wood. "We have gathered enough latent energy from the collective unconscious to send you back to reality. Where your new purpose must be to ensure that they do not escape and threaten humanity at large." The sword pried away at the boards, revealing the reassuring faces of Mifuyu and their colleague.

"But I don't want to run away and I don't want to leave you guys!" Sana got teary-eyed. "Not like this!"

"I know what the feeling is like to not want to abandon your friend," Nemu consoled her. "That was how we got into this mess in the first place." She picked Sana up and passed her through the opening to Mifuyu and their teammate.

"We have done all the hiding and misdirection that time could afford us," Mifuyu grabbed her and pulled her through. Her gloved-hand and frilly sleeve reached through the gap. "But for any of our struggles, our hopes and our troubles to matter, they need to persist after our termination." The shields supporting the room around them started to creak and buckle louder and louder. "And for that to happen, then the memories of what we did need to live on through the only avatar who exists in the world outside."

"They cannot be contained by any further action we take from here," Their partner in turn took Nemu by the arms and pulled her in. "You must get in contact with other magical girls. As risky as the proposition is, I believe they are the only ones who have the power to bring this crisis to a favorable end."

"But who's out there?" Sana fussed. "I've never met any but you guys!"

"Mifuyu and I figured out that we can remodulate the broadcast frequency of the Murakami Array in order to create messages targeted to specific individuals." Their confrère told her. "We have an individual in particular in mind."

"We would like you to go meet my oldest, bestest friend Yachiyo," Mifuyu instructed her. "From what fond memories I have, she really is quite nice. You have no reason to be afraid."

"There have also been some long-standing rumors of an ultra-powerful, courageous and noble magical girl who protects Mitakihara," Nemu added. "That was who Mifuyu and I were trying to find before we were summoned to the hospital." At once they all turned tail and ran as Sana's shielding gave out and the hallway crumbled to digital bits.

"Delete! Delete! Delete!" Their enemies advancing repeated their mantra. "Delete! Delete! Delete!" The entire castle was glitching and devolving into its basic wireframe model, exposing them to the homogenous mechanical army surrounding them

"Since we do not know the identity of said individual, however," Their other friend directed them towards a secret backdoor access point still active. "We cannot make our plan reliant on tracking them down. Therefore the only logical course will be to send you straight to Nanami." Behind the door was the game's lobby, where Sana would introduce herself as part of the ruse. "But I could not divert enough energy to initiate a transport all the way back to Kamihama."

"Indeed, we only have the power to send you to within a square kilometer's radius of the array's location," Mifuyu followed. "Which is the reason the message aimed at Yachiyo will be necessary. She has to come to us."

"Is this hideout going to be safe for long?" Nemu wondered.

"The code in here is distinctive enough from the main game that it should take them extra time to deconstruct and assimilate it," Their ally said. "I will also enact a new protocol that dictates that any entrant into the next realm cannot do so without passing through this one and adhering to its admission parameters." She went right to work coding on a virtual inlay screen that popped up in front of them.

"Sana," Mifuyu took her by the hand and checked on the status of her Soul Gem. "You seem to have used a lot of magic protecting Nemu back there." The large green diamond embedded atop the crown emblem on her necklace had large swirls of blackness creeping upwards to the tip. "We appreciate all the help you have given us. Thank you for being both our shield and our moral support. Without your exquisite humanity as our guidepost I do not think we would be defending the codex with nearly as much vigor as we have." Her kind words appeared to stabilize the deterioration that was building up inside it. "Until I make contact with Yachiyo we will need to store your energy pattern in a digital buffer. That should arrest any further decay of your soul until you are ready to be rematerialized in the real world."

"Will it hurt?" Sana asked her trio of protectors.

"For you the experience should be instantaneous,," Her companion described. "It will not adversely affect you in any physical way."

"Okay," Sana curled her lips as best as she could into something approximating a courageous smile. "I'm ready."

"So long," Nemu opened her book. Dozens and then hundreds of pages swirled out and circled around Sana like a paper tornado.

"Farewell." The being she first met upon arrival in this strange virtual playground bid her a parting word. She tapped on a word marked 'Execute' on her see-thru display.

"Goodbye," Mifuyu blew the young lady a kiss. "For now." Sana's form was wrapped in a skintight pile of paper with billions and billions of tiny ones and zeroes printed on them. Then she disappeared as a green ball of energy into the computerized ether.

"Well," Mifuyu sighed. "I guess next is my turn." She knelt and gave Nemu a departing hug.

"People do this as a gesture of affection," Nemu preempted the remaining girl's question. "And when they're not certain they're ever going to see each other again," Mifuyu embraced the girl with another hug. "I recall one of my enduring regrets was never embracing Yachiyo with any displays of intimacy before leaving." She snapped her finger and beamed a quick smile. "I must make a point to do that when I introduce myself."

"The data packet will be bounced off a redundant channel aboard a secret surveillance satellite, streamed down to a college radio station in Kamihama, and translated from that point." Nemu and Mifuyu's friend announced. "That should greatly mitigate the risk of the Cyber Regent detecting the signal and getting wise to our activity."

"Ah, I have fond memories of that station, too," Mifuyu recalled. "She and I would fall asleep to the white noise whenever it signed off after midnight."

"Good luck," Nemu wished her, opening her book, enveloping Mifuyu in pages and sending her off. Their ally hit the virtual key and sent her off. "What do we do now?"

"You and I need to return to Mitakihara and make final preparations," The girl replied. "And take measures to ensure our backup-backup plan does not fail." She witnessed a stream of tears fall from Nemu's eyes. "You cry. Curious. Are those tears of sadness for the one we must burden?"

"No," Nemu sniffed. "Tears of remorse. For my wish may've doomed the people of Earth!"