The rising sun's just begun to peek over Terminus City's skyline when you first start preparing for your date.

Normally you wouldn't be awake at dawn, but it's only natural to prepare for a special event like this. "Normal humans" make preparations for their dates all the time. "Normal humans" buy flowers. They'd look up restaurants that don't sell repackaged synthpaste, they look up drink menus for those restaurants and think of topics to make for small talk.

"Normal humans" are terribly boring most of the time, but now you're beginning to stray from your point.

The rising sun's light bathes the grimy skyline of Terminus City in ominous shades of reds and oranges. Tall skyscraper-arcologies cast long shadows across the rest of the city, looming across the chaotic urban sprawl and concrete slums.

You inhale, sniff as the reek of industrial smog fills your lungs. The City Council's posted an advisory today to have filtration masks on for this reason. The air pollution's particularly terrible today. It's not much of a risk; your biology's more than magically enhanced enough to deal with trivialities like this.

Still, it's unpleasant. Wretchedly so.

Goodness gracious though, that is a magnificent sunrise. It's definitely put you in a good mood. Yes, you're looking forward to your date today, as soon as you get those pesky preparations out of the way.

Speaking of…

"I didn't think there'd be anyone else up here. Hello there! Are you enjoying the view as well?"

A masked stranger plods up to you, hiking stick in tow, huffing and panting from the hike up to this little overlook. He adjusts his glasses some, peering at you curiously.

"Why, you aren't wearing a mask. That's not good, especially in these conditions – did you forget yours? Oh where are my manners, I'm -"

"Henry Lafans, age 42. Single. You live at the intersection of 42nd street and Greenway Avenue, and you own an occult bookstore near the city center."

"Eh?" The man blinks curiously at you, adjusts his glasses again. "How -" He pauses, his jaw going slack underneath his mask. His eyes dilate, pupils going wide. An effervescent pink glow lights up his sclera.

It's the same arcane pink glow your eyes just flashed briefly. Ah, hypnosis. One of your more favorite tools. Low-level mental magic like this isn't much against magical girls. Their own magical resistances and aptitudes are annoyingly effective in that regard.

But for magicless muggles like this man? It's saved you so many uncomfortable and boring conversations.

So many.

"You also make a trip up to this overlook once a week to look at the sunrise before starting work. You shouldn't have posted about that on social media by the way, it made it ridiculously easy to figure out what your schedule was," you mention casually as you turn to regard the man fully.

He doesn't reply. He just drools vacantly in your direction. You wave, click your fingers, check for a response from the bookstore owner.

There is none. Good. You didn't go through these checks in your youth, and it caused you a fair amount of grief. You might be in a bit of a rush right now, but it's best to be thorough when you're applying hypnosis. Screwups when it comes to mental magic can be catestrophic.

"Now, now, Henry," you say pleasantly. "I need you to do a few things for me. Nod if you understand, yes?"

"Yesh," the man slurs, his head wobbling drunkenly.

"Excellent. Now first… A few questions. There's a girl who frequents your shop. She's a bit of a regular at this point. I'd very much like to know what alias she goes by when she makes her visits…"

Goodness gracious, it really shouldn't take this much work just to get a job in this city. You might honestly have been better served just waltzing into this poor, dumb's man store and having it out with Luminous Libromancer right there. You're starting to feel overworked again, of all things. Getting up early in the morning, tracking this fool down. The things you do for love.

Well, hopefully the payoff will be worth it.

Now, how to go about hypnotizing this man without completely and utterly scrambling his brains...? It wouldn't do for your love to get suspicious, after all.

That'd just ruin the lovely surprise you've got planned for her~

--

"Yo, wassup~" Some drunk moron slurs as he stumbles into you, almost causing you to drop the books you were shelving. You do your level best to play to your cover persona. Shy smile, a bit strained. Unsurprising. You've taken on the guise of a cute, innocent librarian. A hapless newcomer just hired on by Henry Lafans to help maintain his book store, Stranger Fiction. His occult bookstore, rather. You've never seen so many books related to the arcane in one place, actually. Texts on demonology, guides on how to perform basic rituals, false books of prophecy, textbooks laying out how to perform minor cantrips...

Stores like this are rare, but far more commonplace than they used to be a century ago.

After all, in the world of 2137, magic's become as embedded in the public consciousness as science has. The advent of Magical Girls in the modern age has seen to that much. Interest in the supernatural and the occult saw a massive boom in popularity the instant girls like Infinity Princess started wandering the Earth, sword-beaming Kaiju to death on live national television channels. Everyone wants to be a Magical Girl these days. Everyone wants to know if they, too, possess some small inkling of magical talent.

And if they don't, most people would at least like to be informed about some of the supernatural horrors that regularly plague the mega-cities that've arisen in the wake of the Resource Wars.

Which is why this store is able to exist in the wretched hive that is Terminus City, and why it's actually pretty gosh-darned popular. There's actually a corporate seminar being hosted over in a corner. A whole gaggle of suits are nodding avidly as some bland corporate spokesperson gives a canned speech accompanied with cutesy presentation slides on how to avoid getting your liver eaten by a demon, if one should happen to attack your workplace.

You shake your head as you get back to work, stack of books in hand. Some things really never change.

Retail certainly doesn't. The nature of retail work doesn't. And working at a bookstore with a cover position like this is... This is just mindless drudgery. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that hell is other people. He was wrong. People can be fun. The pained noises they can make when you tweak a nerve just so, the pleasurable noises they make if you tweak their endorphins like so... Cute girls are people, and cute girls are justice and love. Cuddling cute girls is justice and love.

This shit though?

This is your hell right here. Mindless drudgery really is your hell. Catering to the unwashed masses is your special hell. Most of the people you've seen are just uncute to boot.

... You miss having minions to play around with. That's definitely something you'll have to work on, you seriously need to start delegating more of these tasks to your minions when you get them...

"Morning Henry," you hear the bell over the bookstore's door jingle as someone new walks in. A tingling feeling runs down the back of your neck as a wave of raw, unfiltered magical power washes over you. It's suppressed, but even still you can practically taste the mana emanating off of this new arrival.

Could it be? Could it possibly be?

"Hey, miss Cabalis! Good to see one of my regulars!" The bookstore owner you'd hypnotized walks over. There's the slightest hint of unsteadiness in his gait. Probably some minor brain damage from being hypnotized for so long, can't really be helped. You had to keep him under a bit longer than you'd prefer, just to make absolutely sure Luminous Libromancer really did regularly visit his bookstore. And then you had to riffle through his memories to scrub the traces of your hypnotism, which probably compounded matters. Eh. You'll fix him at some point. Just to help maintain this cover identity if it comes down to it. You've got your tracks covered for the moment, and as far as side-effects go you've seen far worse.

Surreptitiously, you start threading your way through the shelves towards the front of the store. Strange. Your palms are genuinely clammy. There's a flushed, nervous heat coming across your cheeks. Your heart thumps in your chest, drumming a frenetic beat underneath your ribs. Ah...~

Ah. You know what this is. This feeling... This has to be love. This... Is what you were looking for. This is what it feels like to be a nervous maiden about to meet her crush in the flesh for the first time~!

This is such a delectable sensation. It makes the last thirty minutes you just spent mindlessly shelving books for the fucking unwashed masses worth it. You bite down on your lip as you feel a familiar heat radiating down into your loins. Nnh~!

You're seriously going to need minions, to take the edge off and help slake your lusts if nothing else. Maybe plan fewer cover identities too, it's going to be hard to maintain a myriad of personas if you're feeling like this all the time.

Finally, mercifully, you round the final shelf. And that's when you see her.

Aah~

That adorable little pouty face. The way her eyes scrunch up as she yawns, rubs some sleep out of her eyes. Her silky-smooth hair and skin... And her perfume. Floral notes, a bit of spicy incense. Exquisite.

"You're so loud, Henry. Why do you have to be so loud?" Luminous Libromancer complains, completely unnoticed by the store-goers even though she's one of Terminus City's preeminent Magical Girls, dressed in full regalia. And standing right in the front of the bookstore without a care in the world. That's a pretty powerful glamour she's put on herself, if it's having this kind of effect on the muggles. Some kind of notice-me-not effect specifically tailored towards the non-magical? Oh, you can't wait to dissect the enchantments she's put on herself, to really get a good handle on her personalized style of magic...

No, no. Focus Alice. First impressions first, fun intimate shenanigans later...