Magical Girl Crystal Genocide - All Origins (Patreon)

Hello! 

This post has all 12 origin chapters of the magical girls of Magical Girl Crystal Genocide! There's an Epub linked below as well, if you'd prefer to read on your own device (No images, to save space!)

Please enjoy!

Origin - One - Rending Nightmare

The room was silent in the way that only an exam hall could be.

There was the occasional cough, maybe a sniffle. Often, the silence was broken by the surprisingly loud screech of a chair on the waxed wooden floor.

She took a deep breath and tried to remove herself from the distractions around her, to place herself in that nook in her mind where it was all quiet. Her grandpappy, bless his soul, had taught her that trick. He was a strange man, and she didn’t remember much of him except for his big beard, his smile, and a few of the strange lessons he taught her.

This was one of them, he called it riding the nightmare.

When she was younger she thought it was nothing but a silly way to have fun. Later she cynically thought it was an old man’s way of getting a little girl to sit down and be quiet. Now... now she needed that strange focus.

This was the entrance exam to the Escola Central de Brasil. It was a prestigious campus to be on. From high-school to early college. It had great after-school clubs, it had a political sciences and early-STEM course. It had links to several of the region’s best colleges, and a lot of students from here travelled to the United States to attend one of their ivy-league schools once they graduated high school.

The English teachers were actually English, from England.

The yearly cost for a student was... steep, and that didn’t count the bribes her family had had to pay just to get her to sit in on this exam.

She needed to get good grades on it.

She shifted in her seat and then allowed herself to run a hand through her dark brown hair to push back a bit of sweat. The question was done. On to the next.

Her heartbeat was a drum in her ears, a quick thump-thump beat. She felt a little faint, but pushed through it.

Years of hard work lead to this. If she passed, if she studied hard and graduated with a scholarship, then all of her family’s dreams would be so much closer to being accomplished. She’d go to a good college, maybe go into medicine. That was acceptable for a young woman, and it paid well. Or maybe engineering? She’d like that.

She shook her head and re-read the next question while a staff member walked by her. She kept her head down and her lips shut. Being noticed would be trouble.

So many thoughts and scenarios pushed themselves into her mind. So she closed her eyes, just for a second, and she imagined herself grabbing the nightmares and subjugating them to her will. It was a trick to help her nap better when she was little, a lesson that she was in control  of herself, even of her own fear.

There was no letting fear pass. Fear, anxiety, stress, they were all things she made for herself. She gripped her pen harder and opened her eyes. A glance to the head of the room and she took in the time. Still two hours to go. She refrained from counting the number of pages left.

Someone screamed something at the front of the room. She didn’t pay attention.

Reaching the end of the document she was on, she flipped it over, then penned her name at the top. Alice De Armas. Just the one family name, not that most would question it.

Next was math. She liked math. It was logical and straightforward. The more... abstract maths were a little hard to wrap her head around, but this was meant for a new high school student. It wouldn’t be much more than algebra and geometry.

A few chairs squeaked, and someone ran by. A teacher spotting someone cheating?

She refocused.

Someone jostled her desk and she frowned, but didn’t look up. The first page was laughably easy, but she went over every question again, just in case.

The next scream was much, much louder, and she jumped in her seat. It was too late though, a boy ran into her seat, head turned to look over her shoulder. Alice gasped as her chair was struck and it tipped way, way back, then with a forward swing, it righted itself and she sprawled onto her desk.

She glanced towards the gymnasium’s exit, confused. What was happening?

There was a bright red light coming from the corridor just outside the doors leading into the gym.

A girl stumbled through the doors. She was bleeding, a lot. Her outfit, a pale blouse and long skirt, were stained with more blood than Alice had ever seen.

She tried to stand.

EVEN THE MIGHTIEST LORD OF THE DIVINE HELLS FEARS THE SHADOW OF SLEEP.

Alice stumbled back into her seat. Someone had just shouted at her. No... it wasn’t a shout. She had heard that voice as if someone had turned a megaphone to its highest setting right next to her, but it was too clear for that.

She was dazed, and it took her a moment to stand back up.

The other students were running to the far end of the exam hall. There was a stampede. The door wasn’t opening, no matter how much they pressed and pushed.

FOR IN THOSE MOMENTS OF UNGUARDED NEAR-DEATH, THEY ARE CLOSER THAN ANY TO THE DOMAIN OF SHE WHO RENDS. THE QUEEN OF SHADOWS. THE NIGHTMARE WALKER.

Again, the voice. “What’s going on?” she asked. She didn’t want to go to the back of the room. Even now, the strange panic that had overtaken everyone was only growing, but some intelligence prevailed and people backed away from the door. One of the teachers, a big burly man, reared back and kicked the door.

It thumped, but remained closed.

Another scream, this time from the entrance. A staff member stumbled into the room, she was screaming, a strangely high-pitched yet gurgly scream.

BESTOWED WITH THE WILL TO REMAIN STEADFAST AGAINST ALL, SHE WHO RENDS WILL WALK AND HAS WALKED THROUGH THE SHADOWS OF THE GREATEST FOES OF HEAVEN AND HELL ALIKE.

Alice grabbed at her head. Her heart was pounding in her ears, faster and faster. But it didn’t hurt. “What are you saying?” she asked.

Something told her she was the only one hearing that voice. She didn’t know what it was talking about though. A nightmare? Someone walking through it.

She couldn’t forget the words. Every one of them was right there, loud and clear as if she was reading them from a plaque in front of her very eyes. That didn’t help her understand them though.

FOR WITHIN THE PITS OF DARKNESS, HER REIGN IS ABSOLUTE, AND EVEN THE BRIGHTEST OF LIGHTS CASTS A SHADOW.

The teacher by the door collapsed. Alice noticed the long, serrated knife plunged into her back. It was pitch-black, crude and poorly made.

A few students ran to her, more teachers shouted instructions that no one was listening to. Only a few students had phones out. They weren’t supposed to have those in the exam room to begin with.

A shooter? Here? Today?

No, she hadn’t heard shots. A person with knives?

BECOME THE WHISPER IN THE NIGHT. BECOME THE STRANGLED CALL. BECOME SHE WHO RIPS APART THE SEAMS BETWEEN REALITY. THE NIGHT IS ETERNAL. YOUR SHADOW AWAITS.

Someone... something, stepped into the gym. It was small, no taller than Alice’s hip, with red skin and thin limbs. It was emaciated and gaunt, with little horns atop its head and beady black eyes.

She imagined, for a moment, that it was a large carablanca monkey, but the skin was all wrong. It had a pair of knives.

The creature looked across the room, then laughed, high-pitched and cruel. “So much prey! So many deliciousness for the dark lords! And for us!”

More of them started to file into the room. One of them was dragging a girl. Someone Alice’s age. Dead.

Alice heard the room’s collective gasp, she felt the wave of fear pressing in from everyone else. The only windows were high above. The doors weren’t opening. There was no other exit but that one. They were going to die.

I AM DREAM CHARTER. CRAFTED BY YOUR FUTURE HAND TO GUIDE YOU TOWARDS YOUR INEVITABLE VICTORY.

Alice didn’t feel any of the fear. Or... she did, but her lessons, long ago but frequently practised, came to the fore. She took hold of the fear and made it her own.

She stood taller. Something was happening to her. Her heart beat faster and faster. Her skin felt warm. Her eyes watered, unfocused, then refocused and her vision felt cleaner, more clear, as though she’d been wearing dirty sunglasses indoors and just removed them.

AWAKEN ME, AND BY YOUR COMMAND I SHALL SERVE ONLY YOU, RENDING NIGHTMARE.

It was obscene. It was stupid. She was hearing voices and now there were horned demon monsters filling into the gym. One of them ran at a girl nearby, entirely ignoring a boy between it and the girl. It jumped on her chest and raised an arm to stab down at her.

“Awaken,” she murmured.

LET US SPREAD THE FEAR OF YOU.

Alice almost fumbled the sword that appeared in her hand. Her grip loosened, then tightened on the hilt just in time to stop her from dropping it.

The sword was a deep blue, with a double-edge and a basket over the hilt. She wasn’t sure what kind of sword it was, but it seemed almost... fantastical. The colour, the lightness of it.

What seemed less silly was the way the sword’s shadow travelled down to the ground as an almost solid thing. It didn’t make sense, and yet it did.

“What now?” she asked.

YOU ARE A MAGICAL GIRL. THERE ARE DEMONS INVADING. TRANSFORM.

She froze. A magical girl? For some reason everything up until that moment felt right, believable. Sure, there were demons attacking and she had a magic sword. But being a magical girl? That was just far, far too silly.

Then the girl the nearest demon was on screamed as she was stabbed in the head, and Alice felt her rapid heartbeat stutter. The girl fell, her scream silenced.

Someone had just died while she debated how nonsensical things were.

“How do I... transform?” she asked.

THE SHADOWS ARE YOURS TO COMMAND. DEMAND THAT THEY ASSIST YOU. TAKE CONTROL AND YOUR WILL SHALL GUIDE.

She didn’t know what that meant. She stepped up anyway.

The demon that had stabbed the girl giggled manically, then it jumped up at her.

Alice gasped, tried to grab the sword with two hands, realized that there wasn’t room for her off-hand on the hilt, then she swiped the sword out towards the imp on reflex.

The blade met the demon’s knife and metal went spinning through the air to clatter nearby. The imp pulled its knife back, staring at where the tip should have been. “Bitch whore!” it spat. “Eat your eyesies I will!”

Alice stumbled back. Transform. She was meant to transform. But she was afraid and... and she grabbed her fear. Somehow it was so much easier than it had once been, and also, a lot more literal.

She still fell back, but instead of crashing to the ground, her shadow grew, expanding beneath her and ripping itself free as it fought against the very light that created it with tooth and nail.

The shadows ate her.

For a moment, there was no Alice. And then she was reborn, hatching from a moulting, twisting darkness that had every being that saw it--human or demon--screaming as long repressed fears came to the fore.

The egg cracked, and Alice shot out of it faster than she’d ever moved before.

Her sword painted a black line through the air that casually moved through the imp.

She wasn’t dressed as she had been. Her skirt was replaced with tight pants, like riding pants, and her blouse was now a creamy shirt with ruffles at the chest. She had a caplet of a deep, dark blue, and unfamiliar-but-comfortable hiking boots with golden tassels where laces ought to have been.

The outfit felt incomplete, but she didn’t have time to wonder at it.

“It’s her!” one of the imps screamed.

It ran at her.

Another gurgled something in a tongue that made her skin itch and a ball of greenish fire appeared before it. It tossed it at her.

Alice moved, and almost stumbled at her own speed. The world felt slower, as if it were moving in slow motion whenever she acted. The charging imp was beheaded, then she sliced the fireball apart.

The burning green flames were split apart, but each half still crashed onto the ground and onto a desk and lit both of them up with a gush of fire.

Alice flung a hand out towards the next fireball and the shadows it cast as it moved reversed directions and rose, swallowing the flames with too many teeth.

“Kill it! Kill it for the dark lords!” one imp screamed.

“Eat her soul!” another said. “Eat it and become as a dark lord yourself!”

She didn’t like the sound of that.

Alice ran towards the little demons, the shadows around her leaping up and snatching fireballs out of the air like an eager dog catching treats.

Then she was among the imps and her sword swept left and right. Some tried to parry, but her sword moved through flesh and steel as if it were no more than a suggestion.

And then, with her mind thrumming, Alice came to a stop and looked around her.

Imps, or parts of them, lay across the ground. Some cut, others partially swallowed by their own shadows. Their faces were a rictus of anger and hatred. She couldn’t feel any guilt at what she’d done, only confusion.

WELL DONE, RENDING NIGHTMARE.

The darkness around her slid back, and her sword disappeared with a hiss. She knew she could call it back at a moment’s notice. Her costume faded like darkness before a light, and she was, once more, in her normal outfit.

Then she turned and noticed all the students staring.

“Um,” she said.

How was she going to explain this... and would she have to retake the entrance exam?

***

Origin - One - Fractured Time

The first time Meagan was murdered was about three minutes after stepping off the bus.

Her class was visiting a local museum in what seemed like the cheapest, low-budget-est field trip in the history of field trips. She’d poked her nose into the big blue building with the floor-to-ceiling puzzles and decided that it wasn’t for her.

So she wandered off. Not too far, just back up the slight hill to where their bus was parked. The teacher, Miss Togonon, was the old-school sort who’d busy-body everyone soon enough. For the moment, she was just getting situated and getting things prepared with the tickets.

Then, quite out of nowhere, someone grabbed Meagan from behind.

She figured this wasn’t a joke when she felt something cold and sharp press up against her neck. Meagan fought back, of course, but a few impotent elbow swings didn’t stop the knife from opening up her neck.

She fell soon after, the world around her going very, very dizzy even as warm wetness crawled down her front.

Meagan didn’t expect much out of her life. She had a few simple hobbies, a couple of dreams. Nothing too special. She knew she wasn’t special, and that was okay. Still, she didn’t expect to die quite so soon.

MOVE ON.

Her mind continued to spin and twist, but something nagged at her. Who was it that slit her throat?

She had to know.

IMMORTALITY IS BUT A FACET OF TIMELESSNESS. BREAK THE FACE OF TIME, AND THROUGH THAT BREAK, EMBARK UPON AN ENDLESS QUEST. SATIATE YOUR CURIOSITY.

Something grabbed her just under the navel and pulled.

The voice, thunderous and impossible to miss, continued to bellow in her mind.

A SOUL UNWOUND OF THE MORTAL COIL, UNBOUND BY TIME. YOU ARE RELEASED, AND AS YOUR BELL TOLLS DEAD MY HAND SHALL GUIDE THEE.

“Who?” she asked.

I AM THE CHRONICLE. YOU ARE MY MASTER AND THE MASTER OF EONS, FRACTURED TIME.

Then she woke up with a start in the middle row of a bus that smelled like petrol and piss. She breathed hard, but her heart was steady and still.

Looking around, Meagan discovered a few things right away. First, this wasn’t the rickety field-trip bus. This was the bus she used to get to school. She pulled out her phone and blinked at the screen. It was before classes started.

That was, obviously, impossible.

Just to be sure, she ran a hand over her neck and felt at the lack of cuts there.

“You okay?”

She glanced to the side where Rosa, a girl she frequently sat next to, was pressed up against the window. “Uh.”

“You jumped. Did something bite you?” Rosa asked.

“Huh? No, I’m fine. I just... woke up?”

“But you weren’t asleep,” Rosa pointed out. “Weird.” She turned her head down and focused on her own phone, Meagan’s behaviour easily dismissed.

They were almost to her school, which was time she would have usually spent chatting or doomscrolling on her phone, instead, she kept looking around herself to make sure everything was real.

The trip to the puzzle museum had felt real... as real as any recent memory. She was starting to doubt her own sanity. So, of course, she tried to talk to the voice in her head. That meant thinking a tentative ‘hello’ first.

GREETINGS, MASTER.

She jumped again, and Rosa glanced up from her phone.

“Hiccups,” she lied.

Rosa nodded and looked back down. As soon as she wasn’t paying attention Meagan returned to thinking hard. First, who the voice was, and second... why?

I AM SHATTERED HOROLOGE, YOUR STAFF, YOUR WEAPON, YOUR GUIDE. I WAS SENT TO YOU BY YOU, TO UNVEIL THE PATH TO BECOMING A POWERFUL MAGICAL GIRL.

“I’m a magical girl?” Meagan asked, astonished and confused.

A few heads turned her way and she felt her cheeks warming. That had been louder than intended.

“Yeah, I always figured you were,” Rosa said. “The way you look at some girls.”

“N-not that way,” she hissed to Rosa. “I mean... I’m having a weird morning.”

“Uh-huh. You need something?” Rosa touched her purse, the offer obvious.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she replied before sitting back.

The bus soon arrived at her school and she grabbed her things and filed out with the rest. Her grade was the only one who had a field trip that day, and the trip was only in the first half of the day. She’d have to get to Miss Togonon’s class sooner or later.

But before that... “Hey, I need to use the washroom,” she said to Rosa.

“I’ll go with,” Rosa replied.

Meagan shook her head and made a small ‘no, no’ gesture. “I’ll be fine, promise.”

“Okay?” Rosa said. “You sure? I’ve got, like, gym clothes in my locker if you need something to change into.”

“It’s not that kind of thing,” Meagan said. “But thanks.” She darted into the school and then walked fast to the far end where there was a less-commonly used washroom right next to the gym. It wasn’t used as much because it was gross inside, having been last remodelled sometime in the late seventies, and only one of the three stalls had a working toilet.

Meagean leaned up against the front of the bathroom’s sink and stared at herself in the mirror.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked.

No one replied.

“Are you even real... Shattered Horologue?” She didn’t know what that word even meant. She’d look it up on her phone later though.

I AM REAL.

“Prove it,” she said.

SAY THE WORDS, AND I WILL BE BY YOUR SIDE.

She paused, considering what the voice in her head had just said. That was probably not a healthy thing to do. The words though... it took a moment, but she found them. Two words that just felt right.

“Move on.”

Time stopped.

She didn’t notice, not at first. The absence of time wasn’t immediately noticeable, after all. It was only in the silence that she didn’t hear time flowing. No talking from the old clock above the washroom door, no gurgling from the pipes, no distance voices and the squeak of sneakers from the main hall.

Then she noticed herself in the mirror.

Her clothes had changed. Her normal school outfit was a nice blouse and some jeans. Cheap but workable.

Now she was in a strange dress, with large lapels at the front that almost looked like a caplet and a short, pleated skirt. All in dark blues that verged on purple. She had a hat on too, a little thing with a wavy brim, some lace, and a cute bow on the side.

“Okay,” she said. “I am a magical girl... that’s cool.”

She twisted from side to side and checked herself out. The outfit was nice. A bit on the leggy side, and maybe it could have done something to suggest more in the chest, but she gave it two-thumbs-up.

It felt incomplete though. “Is there more?”

AS YOU GROW, SO WILL YOUR POWER, YOUR ABILITIES, AND YOUR MAGIC. YOUR COSTUME--A REFLECTION OF YOUR SOUL, WILL DISPLAY THESE CHANGES.

So, it wasn’t her final form. She was a magical girl noob. Great. She touched her hair, which now had a streak of white across it. Her glasses had changed too, from the fashionable square-rimmed ones she had to a smaller, more delicate pair with round frames decorated with faint filigree.

“Right. Magic. Okay.” She took a deep breath, and then time reasserted itself like a wave clawing onto shore.

She was still in her new outfit. Which might be an issue, but it was low on her list of problems at the moment.

“So, now what? Do I have to do something? I... guess I died, is there a price to pay for all of this? My soul? My eternal servitude? Am I going to turn into a man-eating witch? A creature of despair and evil?”

She’d seen her share of magical girl deconstruction anime, she knew what was up.

YOU PAY NO PRICE. YOU SERVE NO ONE BUT YOURSELF. YOU ARE FRACTURED TIME.

“Okay then,” Meagan said. “So, do I get a cute animal companion?”

ONLY MYSELF AND YOUR FELLOW MAGICAL GIRLS.

“So there’s others?”

YES.

“Will you tell me about them?”

NO.

She nodded. “Cool, cool. Yeah, totally great.” Leaning forwards, she grabbed onto the edge of the sink again and did a few rudimentary breathing exercises to calm herself down. There was a lot to take in, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for it.

One thing was for certain though, she was a little more special than she’d anticipated.

“I can summon you, right? You’re a weapon?”

YOUR WEAPON.

“And you’re not some super-advanced alien AI jammed into my head to help me prevent the end of the world?” she asked, just to be sure.

I AM NOT. THOUGH THERE IS LITTLE I AM PERMITTED TO REVEAL ABOUT MY PAST.

“But you’re my weapon, and you’re meant to obey me, then couldn’t I order you to tell me?” she asked.

YES. BUT THE ORDER COMES FROM AN ENTITY WITH EQUAL AUTHORITY.

She grinned. There was the catch. “And who’s that? Or can you not say?”

I CAN REVEAL THAT THE ENTITY IS YOU.

Meagan paused, then frowned. “Well, that’s a catch-twenty-two, isn’t it?”

YOU MIGHT WANT TO CONSIDER TURNING YOUR ATTENTION TOWARDS YOUR MURDERERS. WHILE YOU BENEFIT FROM A MAGICAL GIRL’S CONSTITUTION, YOU ARE STILL NEW. STILL VULNERABLE.

For some reason, the thought of capturing the person who’d killed her hadn’t crossed her mind. “You don’t happen to know who that was, do you?”

I DO NOT.

“Meagan?” Rosa’s voice asked, the bathroom door was opening.

Meagan, of course, freaked out, she couldn't be seen dressed the way she easy (not just because she was certain the skirt wouldn’t pass muster with some of the older teachers who still believed that all skirts should end somewhere around the ankle) but also because it would all require a lot of explaining she wasn’t sure she was ready to do.

Time slowed to a crawl.

It wasn’t just a metaphor, she felt time slowing down as she panicked. “How do I undress?” she hissed.

THINK ABOUT IT.

Her eye twitched at the sarcastic reply, but then... she did think about it, eyes half- closed, breathing even. Her costume unravelled. Every thread flew back and away, even a bit of lace warped and twisted. It was like watching a fast-backward of someone putting together an intricate tapestry.

When it was all done, she was back in her blouse and jeans and Rosa stepped around the door into the washroom. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey,” Meagan replied. She opened the tap and washed her hands in cold water. “Sorry. You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” Rosa said. “Miss Togonon will have our heads if we’re late today. Got your permission slip and all of that?”

“Yeah, it’s all in my bag.”

The last time she’d lived that moment she’d had a small panic attack when she couldn’t find the slip. This time she knew it was in the outer pocket of her bag. Time travel, she imagined, was going to be great to have when it came to life’s little inconveniences.

They rushed back to their classroom where the old teacher and a pair of parent volunteers were checking over everyone’s permission slips. The blackboard was covered in instructions which basically boil down to: Don’t be an embarrassment; and do as I say.

She joined Rosa in chatting with a few others, but she wasn’t feeling terribly social. For one thing, she’d heard all the gossip already, and while rehearing gossip was part of what made gossip fun, she wasn’t used to hearing it so exactly twice in a row. Besides, her mind was on other things, like figuring out who in her class, if anyone, had murdered her, why, and also what to do about the whole... magical girl thing.

She definitely needed to watch more anime.

Maybe time travel could help with that?

“Meagan?” one of the girls asked.

“Sorry, I was just... hey, if you suddenly have time powers, would you be okay with using them to binge TV shows?”

“What kind of question is that?” Rosa asked with a laugh.

Meagan laughed along too. “I don’t know. Better than finding out who Jason slept with this week. So what if he’s after Maria again.”

“You heard about that too?”

The teacher called the excited class to attention, and then gave them a half-hour-long lecture about safety and not wandering away from the group which she took a lot closer to heart now than she did the last time.

As they left the school and boarded a bus driven by a man old enough to be her grandpa (probably not him, even if he was close to where she was murdered. He looked a little too thin to pull it off) she kept looking at her fellow classmates and wondering which one, if any, was the one who’d tried to kill her.

For a silly trip to a strange museum, it was turning out to be pretty darned tense.

***

Origin - One - Happy Sparkles

So far, Rosa thought that being a magical girl was quite cool.

It, of course, came with a lot of perks. She slept like a babe, she felt better and had more energy, and when she did the laundry she could just change into her magical girl costume while the rest of her clothes were in the wash.

The magic was like a cherry on top of a double-decker sundae, and she was all for it.

There was only one teensy little thing that made it a little hard, and that was the overwhelming responsibility that came with the magic.

She was a magical girl, which meant, of course, that she was now responsible for keeping her neighbourhood and city and maybe even the world, safe.

Kitten Sage had been great so far. It was the kindest, nicest chainsword she’d ever met. It was also both the only chainsword she’d ever met, and the only weapon she’d ever shared a conversation with. It had been teaching her all sorts of things about being a magical girl, and for a little while, she’d kind of just assumed that those responsibilities wouldn’t ever show up.

Then, last night while watching the evening news, Kitten Sage had pointed out that one of the politicians currently up for election was a vampire.

“No way!” she said with a gasp.

“Sweetie?” her mom asked. She poked her head into the living room and looked around. “Did something happen on the news?”

“No, it’s nothing mom,” Rosa said with her most winsome grin. Her mom smiled back while Rosa pointed to the TV. “One of the guys running for Minister-President in Saarland is a vampire.”

Her mom blinked, then pressed a hand over her mouth to stifle a laugh. “Yes, sweetie, he’s a politician. I didn’t ever imagine you being interested in politics. It’s good. In a few years you’ll be old enough to vote, you know.”

“I meant it literally,” Rosa said, but her mom waved her off and went back to the kitchen. She was whipping up some breakfast since it was her turn. Their little family of three took turns making breakfast in a sort of rotation. That meant that they had a good, solid meal two days out of three--her dad couldn’t cook, even if he claimed otherwise and tried his hardest.

Rosa continued to watch TV, but soon enough she had to get up and shut it off.

“So, is the fact that he’s a vampire going to be a problem?” she asked.

VAMPIRES ARE HUNTERS. THEIR PREY IS HUMANITY. BUT THEY ARE LONGER LIVED AND SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE HUMAN, AND THEIR MAGICS ARE BOTH SUBTLE AND LONG-LASTING.

Kitten Sage’s voice was like a gentle fog-horn in her ear, as always. Once she got better at magic, she determined that she was going to figure out how to adjust the metaphorical volume knob on her weapon’s voice.

A problem for later; right now, she had breakfast to look forward to.

She sat down, and her mom placed some sausage and eggs onto her plate. “Eat quick, the bus will be here in an hour.”

“Uh-huh,” Rosa said. In reality her mind was elsewhere. It wasn’t quite nice of her to tune out though, so she smiled at her mom and dug in.

Then her dad dragged himself into the kitchen and plopped himself down at her seat. “Oh, eggs,” he said.

“Just the way you like them,” her mom said. She placed some on his plate, then Rosa looked away as her parents kissed. She knew it was great that she had parents who loved each other, but she really didn’t need to see it.

“Dad,” she said. “Can I ask you a hypothetical?”

“Of course,” he said as he poured himself some coffee. “What is it, Sweetie?”

“Let’s say you find out that a politician is... uh, corrupt, I guess. Like, they’re really bad. What do you do?”

“Vote them out,” he said.

“And if that’s not an option? Like, they’re using evil vampire magic to trick people into voting for them?” It was just a suspicion on her part, but... well, the Nachzehrer Demokratische Partei had only sounded a little weird before she discovered that vampires were an actual thing.

Then again, maybe she shouldn’t have been too surprised. She grabbed the coffee from her dad and poured herself a cup after stealing her mom’s mug. Her mom didn’t like her drinking coffee, but that didn’t stop Rosa from taking a few sips... with lots of milk and sugar, of course.

“There are systems in place to prevent that sort of thing... well, perhaps not for magic since magic isn’t real, but still.”

“Huh,” she said. “And if those systems don’t know? Like, let’s say you discover something really awful about a local politician. Really, really bad. Who do you tell?”

He frowned. “This is sounding less hypothetical by the minute. Did something happen, Rosa?”

“Just asking,” she said quickly before turning her attention to her plate.

“You could tell the media, I suppose. They’re another sort of vampire, but they feed on that kind of story,” he mom said as she sat with her own plate. “Now, eat up, the bus won’t wait for you, you know.”

Rosa nodded and did just that, but... well, she felt a little bad about it, but she didn’t intend to go to school today.

She wasn’t going to tell her parents that, though. They’d worry needlessly, and she didn’t want them to do that. No, so far she’d been a straight 1.0 student, so missing one day wouldn’t be that big of a deal, would it?

Her tummy roiled a bit at the idea, but she justified it to herself easily enough. After all, magical girls needed to do magical girl things, and that might mean skipping out on a lesson or two. That was how it was in all the anime she’d watched.

Breakfast done, she ran to her room, changed out of her PJs and into a nice blouse and skirt in pale purples, which were her favourite colours, then it was back out of the house. She didn’t think either of her parents noticed her leaving with just her purse and no backpack.

“Okay!” She said aloud. “Now, if I were a media company ready to report on the appearance of vampires, where would I hide?”

That turned out to be a harder question to answer than she’d originally thought. A bit of time spent on Google pointed her towards a couple of news stations in the middle of the city, so she walked a few blocks out and to the nearest Saarbahn tramway stop.

It felt bizarre, travelling across the city on her own. There was a bit of worry there, some tension she wasn’t used to feeling. Fortunately, no one talked to her on the tram and when she finally got off she only had to look at her phone to see where to go.

Of course, she stopped by a little coffee place and grabbed an iced coffee with one shot of every syrup they had and a fresh chocolatine imported from France (which really wasn’t saying much when France was spitting distance away, but it did mean it cost a bit more).

Rosa skipped along while downing her food. According to Kitten Sage magical girls had bodies that were much improved compared to a normal person’s. She was betting that meant it would be harder to gain weight.

Well, she hoped that was the case, which was why she was eagerly testing it.

The only other ways to test that would be to hurt herself, and that sounded like a very impractical and unhealthy thing to do. “Hey, Kitten Sage,” she said.

MY NAME IS KETTENSÄGE.

“That’s not a very wholesome name,” Rosa countered. “Besides, nicknames are a great way to become friends with someone, right? So, I wanted to know, are there others? Other magical girls, I mean?”

THERE ARE TWELVE AND ONLY TWELVE.

“Neat!” she said. Rosa couldn’t wait to meet the others. She was sure they’d all become fast-friends.

She took a sip from her drink as she stood before the SMC-media building. It was a six-story place in downtown, all mirrored glass and sharp, modern architecture with a few digital billboards on the side cycling through ads for different programs the station ran.

Stepping in, Rosa glanced around the lobby, then walked up to the counter at the far end where she was greeted by a young woman in a nice uniform. “Hello, how may I help you?”

“Hi,” Rosa said. “I, ah, don’t know exactly how any of this works, but if I have a story to tell, is there a way to contact a journalist?”

The receptionist blinked, then gave Rosa one of those charming-but-fake customer service smiles. “We have a contact system on our webpage where you can send our team an email. It’s entirely anonymous, if you wish it to be.”

“Oh, no, I don’t care about that kind of stuff. I really just want to talk to someone who can help me. It’s, uh, well, somewhat sensitive? I’ve discovered something about a local politician, and... yeah.”

“Well... give me a moment, I’ll see if someone’s available to speak with you,” the lady said.

Rosa grinned back and rocked on the balls of her feet as she waited. This was going great so far.

“Ah, Tim will come to meet you,” the receptionist said with that same plastic smile. “You can wait off to the side, if you want.”

“Thanks!” Rosa said. She shuffled off to a bench and sat down for the illusive Tim to show up. Fortunately, it didn’t take all that long. Tim, as it turned out, was a thin guy in a slightly frumpled suit and with messy hair who walked into the reception space oozing nervous energy.

“Ah, hi,” he said as he came over and extended a hand, then pulled it back, then extended it again as he seemed to realise that he was being a little rude.

“Hello,” Rosa said as she changed her iced coffee from one hand to the other and shook. “You’re Tim, I take it?”

“That’s me,” he said. “I was told that you had a story?”

“I do,” Rosa said. “But maybe this isn’t the place for that?”

“Oh, sure, please follow me.”

Tim led her into an elevator and stood there rather awkwardly as they rode up three floors. Then he guided her through a cubical farm to a space near the centre. His cubicle had a small wooden desk with a laptop on it, an old office chair at the back, and an even older chair on the guest-side of the desk.

“Please, sit,” Tim said with a weak smile as he positioned himself behind his desk. “So, I didn’t get much information from reception, she said you had a story? Something nice and wholesome? Your school team struck a victory? Maybe a fundraiser for a club?”

Rosa giggled. “No, it’s nothing like that. I just didn’t know who to approach about this, but... yeah, the NDP is staffed by vampires.”

“Pardon?” Tim asked.

“The political party,” she explained.

“I’m familiar with them,” Tim said. “But, uh, I don’t know if I’m the person for political pieces.”

“In that case ,could you point me in the right direction, please?”

Tim scratched at the hints of stubble on his cheek. “Um, miss...”

“Sparkles,” she said.

“Miss Sparkles... wait, is that really your name?”

She shook her head. “It was supposed to be Magical Girl Hysterical Slaughterfest, but that’s way too much of a downer. I much prefer Magical Girl Happy Sparkles.”

“What?”

Rosa nodded along. “Look, I know it’s a lot to take in, but magic is real, and so are Vampires, and right now some of our local politicians are blood-suckers who may or may not want to take over the world or something, so I just thought we ought to report that.”

“Uh-huh,” Tim said. He was very notably not writing anything.

“I can prove it, if you want,” Rosa said. “Not the vampire thing, that’ll take some work, but that magic is real.”

Tim smiled, and it was that kind of smile an adult wore before a kid showed them a lame trick. “I’m afraid that--”

Rosa smiled right back. Then the entire office glowed a vibrant pink. Laughter filled the room, hysterical, insane laughter, and with that, Rosa started to spin and dance, never really leaving the same spot, but moving around all the same while her clothing glowed and disappeared, only to be replaced with her magical girl costume.

It was a very nice costume, she found. A long-enough skirt, a sweater with frills. Very modest. It even had a little bowtie.

Then, once the magic died down, Rosa reached a hand to her chest and laid it flat against her sternum. Her chest burst open and Kitten Sage ripped its way out of her with a roar. She flicked the weapon around, which was tricky since it was nearly half as long as she was tall, and then let it clunk onto Tim’s desk.

Somehow, her chest wasn’t shredded after the chainsword came out of her, but she chalked that up to magic being magic.

“So,” she said with a dazzling smile. “Ready to believe in magic yet?”

Then Tim’s desk shuddered and crashed to the side, unable to handle the weight of her sword laying atop it.

***

Origin - One - Gravity’s Heartbeat

Shanti didn’t expect to spend her Saturday morning hiding behind an embankment with a tree, but there she was.

All she wanted was to head out and grab some junk food, maybe a soda or something. She had an allowance and intended to spend it. She had stepped out of the house, leaving her parents in their respective offices without saying goodbye, and started to cross the city.

The more touristy parts of Pokhara were always busy this time of year, but that also meant that the shops would all be stocked up.

She expected to maybe see a few clueless Americans and Europeans. What she didn’t expect to see was a group of tigers roaming the streets.

There were only supposed to be a couple of thousand of those left, or so she’d been taught at school. They were meant to be protected, held in zoos or something. They weren’t supposed to be walking down one of the side streets next to her highschool, they weren’t supposed to be dragging people by the scruff of their shirts, they weren’t supposed to be walking next to snakes, foxes and colourful birds, and they certainly weren’t supposed to be wearing clothes!

She poked her head around the embankment again, just enough to see what was going on.

The wild animals were pushing through the gates in front of the school. An elephant (where did that come from?) grumbled then used its trunk to pull the pin holding the gate open out of the ground, then it pushed the gate closed with its tusk.

A fox wearing a child’s neon jacket jumped up onto its hindlegs and helped latch the gate shut.

Shanti smacked her cheeks to wake herself up. This had to be a fever dream of some sort. Animals didn’t act like that outside of cartoons.

Carefully, she backed up and away from the wall. Something was going on, and it was going on inside of her school. So, she did the obvious thing and pulled out her phone. It was an old thing, one that her mom insisted that she carry around in case of emergencies.

She figured this counted.

With another peek at her school to make sure she wasn’t see ran off next to the entrance of a nearby home and hid while pulling her phone out. She dialled 100 and waited as the phone rang.

“Emergency services, how can I help you?” a woman asked on the other end.

Shanti leaned into her phone. “Yes, hello, um...” she froze. Would anyone believe her? Then again, her parents had always told her to say the truth, and adults would know that sometimes things were a little strange. “My school’s being invaded by walking animals.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s true. There’s foxes with clothes on, and tigers and an elephant. I know it sounds strange, but can you help me?”

“Miss, we don’t have time for prank calls.”

“It’s not a prank call! There’s a fox in a jacket from the 90s walking outside my school. They kidnapped people!”

The link clicked and went dead.

Shanti glared at her phone. That was ridiculous. They shouldn’t have hung up, even if it was a prank call, which it wasn’t, that was just bad etiquette.

“Fine then,” she muttered. She would have to do something about it herself, she decided. Her phone had a camera. She’d grab some proof and figure out what was going on herself.

Her heart beat faster than ever as she poked her head out and looked around. The coast was clear.

Fortunately, she knew her school. It was a fairly new building, added just a few years ago as the city grew. She was in one of the first classes to ever attend, and it was way better than the school she’d been to before.

Running as quick as she could, Shanti went around the front of the school with its open courtyard and hugged the exterior wall. There was a door that led into the gym, but she zipped past that one, then came to a stop next to the far corner. She poked her head around the bend, searched for any animals, then she darted over to a door at the back of the school. It was next to a set of dumpsters, with a small wall around them.

It was where the cool kids--notably, not Shanti--went to vape and hang out.

The doors at the back had electronic locks that would close them from the outside when classes were in session or when school was closed. It meant that if someone was late, they had to get in through the front office.

It, of course, only took a few weeks for everyone to figure out how to break through anyway.

She checked inside and down the corridor past the door. Still no animals, just rows of lockers and an unlit passageway. Shanti pulled back, then snuck over to the place where she knew the others hid their ‘universal lock.’

It was a coat hanger with some tape on it, pressed in close behind a dumpster. She grabbed it and went to the door, then jammed the ‘key’ into the crack. The electronic lock only lowered a little bar down across the door. It was relatively easy to flick the bar up, though it would fall back down.

That was, unless someone was pulling at the door, in which case it would jam, and all they’d need to do was wiggle the bar up while putting pressure on the door.

She stepped back as the door opened. “That was way too easy,” Shanti muttered before tossing the key aside. She glanced around, found  a decent-sized rock, and jammed it under the door, leaving it open a crack as she stepped in.

Walking through school after it was closed was... pretty normal, really. Both of her parents were teachers (professors, really) and so she’d spent a fair bit of time walking down school corridors after closing time. It was nice, in a way. Fewer people meant no crowds, and the place was nice and quiet, enough so that she could hear the ka-thump, ka-thump in her chest as she tried to stay quiet.

Now, all she had to do was discover where the animals were hiding, take a few pictures, then... actually, she wasn’t too sure where she was going with this plan.

She was in too deep to just pull out though, and something told her that she had to push forward with this.

Was it kind of stupid?

Yes, yes it was.

Was she doing it anyway?

Also yes.

“This isn’t like you, Shanti,” she whispered to herself.

The corridor ended in the school’s central hall. To one side of that was the cafeteria, with four stairwells in the corners of the hall leading to the corridors and classrooms on the second floor. The office was by the front of the school, on the opposite end as the cafeteria and diagonal to both the gym and their little theatre-slash-auditorium.

There were animals dragging people at the end of the hall, next to the offices and the main entrance and about as far from where she was as they could be. She hunkered down, pulled out her phone, made sure it was muted, then stuck it out around the corner and took a few quick pictures.

Then she backed up and looked at them.

They were a blurry mess, but she could kinda make them out. It wasn’t ideal though.

Someone screamed, and she flinched. That was right, those tigers had been carrying people with them. Then, as she paid attention, she heard someone talking in exactly the kind of tone someone wouldn’t use when addressing surprisingly smart animals.

“Worry not, fellow man! Your sins against the environment will be cleaned away soon!” A man’s voice, one that sounded close to laughter.

She pushed her camera around the corner and took another picture before bringing it back. Yup, there was a man there, in the kind of clothes she’d seen mountain-climbing tourists wearing.

Strange didn’t cover the half of it.

The animals, their captives, and the man all entered the gymnasium, and soon the coast was clear.

She hesitated. There was some proof on her phone, but would the police believe her now? Could she call the army instead? A zoo? Did they even have animal control that was equipped for Bengal tigers?

Shanti decided that she needed more evidence, and maybe more hints of what, exactly, was going on.

Entering the gym from the front would be stupid though, and the side door was very obvious. What was less obvious, she thought, were the bleachers on the second floor. There was a way to reach them from above too.

She glanced around the corner to make sure there wasn’t anyone, then she darted across the hall and up the stairs at a dead sprint. Her shoes clacked on the ground at the same fast beat as her heart, but she made it to the stairs without alerting anyone, then she slowed down and checked the upper floor.

The lights were all out, and it didn’t look like anyone had been through.

She didn’t run, because that would be a little too noisy and she was worried that people could hear her heart thumping already. Her nerves were on edge, her palms sweaty, and she felt like the corridor was subtly pulsing in and out.

Still, she didn’t turn back.

The door to the bleachers was, predictably, locked. She had to pull out her wallet, fish out her library card, and wiggle it between the lock and handle to get it to pop open.

Shanti considered whether the amount of doors she broke through that day was healthy or not, but she had other things to be concerned about.

Leaving the door open a crack, she slid into the section with the bleachers and carefully pulled the door closed behind her after making sure it wouldn’t lock up again.

With gentle, silent steps, she snuck around the many rows of seats looking down onto the main floor of the gym. The floor was separated into three volleyball courts, though when they had a big game it could be rearranged into a single one in the direct centre.

The animals were using the lines on the ground to split the room up. On one side were a dozen people, some of them clutching at wounds and cuts, others just looking a little dazed, and on the other, a few desks had been laid out with what looked like beakers and science equipment taken from the school’s lab.

Animals were roaming around. Foxes and wolves, a few large and rather colourful birds, a rhino which was so large she wasn’t sure how it had fit into the room, and even a few blackbucks. What caught her attention the most, though, were the tigers and wolves.

Mostly, that was because they were armed.

The big animals had jackets on, with rips and tears and obviously re-sewn sections that allowed them to fit on their non-human frames, but most of them also had guns.

Guns on metal mounts that circled their torsos and came out ahead of them. They were all pistols on little swivel mounts and with what she guessed were bite-activated bars connected to the triggers.

There was a lot more duct-tape involved in the mount’s construction than anyone would be comfortable with. But what really had her confused was...everything about that.

The biggest of the tigers was as long, from tail-tip to the end of its snout, as a car. It didn’t need a gun.

“Are you ready for the next one?” one of the tigers growled.

Shanti almost jumped out of her skin at the voice. It was unmistakably the tiger who spoke, the big one.

Talking animals that were human-intelligent.

She pulled out her phone and started filming. This was important.

“Yes, we’re nearly ready. Bring out the next one,” the man from earlier said.

A pair of sleek wolves walked over to the people and then grabbed the one who was slowest to back away by the leg. He was pulled over to the table with the beakers and science equipment.

Shanti watched in confused horror as a few more animals came up and held the man down, then the only human on the animal’s side picked up a large syringe and jabbed it into the man’s torso.

She gasped at the sudden violence, and her heart beat even louder as she watched the man scream and flail and turn into an animal.

It was horrific to watch. His arms and legs spun in on themselves and he twisted about until, with a scream, his hands morphed into hooves and his clothes went loose over his body.

Soon, the animals around the man backed up, and what was left laying there was an antelope with twisting horns and a braying, confused cry.

DO YOU HEAR THE WORLD’S BEAT?

Shanti eeped, and then stared with widening eyes as a few of the animals looked her way, then the rest followed their example and soon she was being stared at by everything present.

“Go back,” the tiger said to the man. “We’ll take care of the interloper. They might have contacted the authorities already.”

The man scoffed, then ran to the table and started tossing syringes into a duffel bag before he ran off. A few of the tigers and wolves ran with him.

“Get her,” the tiger roared.

Shanti spun around and started to run up the stairs to the exit, but her head spun and the world felt like it was shifting in and out in time with the thumping in her chest.

She stumbled and winced as her shin smacked against the next step up. Her phone went clattering away.

“Get her!”

YOUR SOUL KEEPS A FUNDAMENTAL FORCE IN CHECK. BUT WHAT IS POWER IF LEFT UNGUIDED? LET YOUR HEART GUIDE YOU. LET YOUR KINDNESS USHER IN A BETTER FUTURE, LET YOUR ANGER PILOT YOU TOWARDS JUSTICE. TRUST YOURSELF.

She turned. The animals closest to her were already on the steps, rushing up to meet her faster than she could move.

The voice in her head... that wasn’t the animal.

Her heart beat again, and this time she knew she wasn’t the only one to feel it. The animals twitched, the building felt like it pulsed.

A massive tiger, not the one giving the orders, but a larger tiger than any teenage girl should ever have to face, leapt up and reached for her with a paw bigger than her head. She saw white claws stretching out.

“Stop!” she shouted.

I AM PULSE, THE ARTERY OF YOUR WILL. TOGETHER LET US SHOW THE UNIVERSE YOUR HEART, GRAVITY’S HEARTBEAT.

Shanti’s heart stopped. She didn’t feel it anymore. It was still, quiet.

When she opened her eyes she found her outstretched hand gripped around a wand with a floating heart within its crook. She wasn’t dressed in the same clothes.

More concerning, the tiger was floating ahead of her, paws batting at the air with almost comical confusion.

Then her heart thumped, and everything grew so much heavier. The animal came crashing straight down.

“Oh, oh wow,” she said.

“Did I tell you to stop?” the tiger roared.

With an eep, she bounced to her feet and fled. She could figure out what all of that was later, once she wasn’t being chased by ravenous carnivores.

***

Origin - One - Burning Ultranova

They’d only been on the station for a little over two years, but already, there was something of a... culture developing.

Jacqueline wasn’t an expert on developing cultures, but there were a couple of psychologists (not to mention a few who’d minored in the subject) on the base who would gladly go on and on about the subject.

Port Martin was currently the largest inhabited, year-round settlement on Earth’s final frontier. It was slapped on top of some old station from the 1950s that had burned down and had been turned into a historical site because what else were they going to do about a tiny station way out in Antarctica.

For the most part, Jacqueline didn’t mind living there. It was more interesting than France, and part of her knew that it would make for a good story when she got older.

But life in the Antarctic wasn’t without a few issues.

“Where are you going?” her dad asked as she stomped out of her sleeping space and towards the habitation’s door.

“Out,” she replied. Then, when that wasn’t enough, she rolled her eyes and raised her phone. “Trying to look at stuff, but I’m getting negative bars.”

“Ah,” he said. “Come back before light’s out.”

She chuckled, and this time he was the one who rolled his eyes. The joke had gotten stale during the very first week of their stay. The light outside was only up for a few hours a day, and that was if they were lucky. There was a period in the first year of their stay where all the psychologist-types were worried that people would get depressed because they had a two month stint with no sunlight.

In her expert opinion, what depressed people wasn’t the lack of sunlight, it was the god-awful internet connections they had. The snow piled up onto the dishes atop the base, so they’d only get a signal when someone dared to go outside with a shovel and a broom to clear off the snow.

“Alright, see ya,” she said as she stepped over the lip under their house’s door. All the habitation units in the station were arranged like the spokes on a big wheel, with smaller ones within, and larger, family units on the outside of the wheel.

Theirs was a family unit, and it was about half the size of a shoebox.

That wasn’t entirely fair. They had two little beds, a small sitting area, and that was about it. The bathrooms were communal, one for each housing ring.

She walked past the girl’s bathroom on the way to the bridge connecting their ring to the main station habitation quarter. She walked with her phone up, carefully studying the little bars at the top right.

There were a dozen habitation rings taking up about half the station’s entire space. The other half was all warehouses, garages, greenhouses, and all the other stuff they needed to keep the station working.

Mostly, her entire life for the past couple of years was spent in the main station, where a grand total of a thousand two hundred people lived, making it the largest over-winter station on the continent.

At least, for now. The Americans were talking of setting up their own within their own slice of Antarctica, because they couldn’t endure being showed up.

“Hey, Jacquie!”

“Oh, fuck me,” she muttered.

When her parents had both excitedly told her that they were going to live in Antarctica for a long, long while, she’d actually been somewhat excited too. Jacqueline had... issues regarding her behaviour that made it difficult for her to assimilate in a school environment.

That’s how her therapist had phrased it.

Others just called her a raging, hormonal bitch with anger issues.

Personally, she preferred to think of herself as a person with a low tolerance for stupidity, so the trip to the literal end of nowhere sounded perfect. Thousands of kilometres away from the next idiot, a station filled with talented scientists and researchers and interesting people.

And then she’d discovered that she wasn’t the only teenager around.

“Hey Chloe, hey Julia,” she said. She very pointedly didn’t say hi to Anthony, who’d been the one to call her over. He grinned as if she’d done a whole lot more than just ignore him as she came over to the table in the corner of the dinning room and sat down next to Chloe.

“Hey, how are you?” Anthony asked.

“I’m alright,” she said. “Looking for a signal. It’s been shit today, hasn’t it?”

“All day,” Chloe agreed. “It’s been pretty bad in our ring too.”

“Maybe classes will be cancelled again?” Julia asked.

“I hope so,” Jacquline said. Their classes were split into an online segment and more-or-less normal classes taught in a room in the recreation ring. There were twelve students in the class. That wasn’t too surprising, really. There were only so many people willing to bring their kids along, and only so many researchers who had kids to begin with. It made for an interesting schooling experience.

She didn’t mind it. Some of the ‘teachers’ were terrible, but a number of them were legitimate experts in their field. Biology was taught by one of the doctors, the science and math classes were taught by people with PHDs in their respective subjects. It made for some rather haphazard but still fun education.

“So, what did you want to look up?” Anthony asked. He was all smiles and had immediately set on ignoring the other two the moment she arrived. He was also staring down the front of her blouse whenever he thought she wouldn’t notice.

She always noticed. Jacqueline didn’t understand why boys couldn’t get it into their thick skulls that girls always knew.

“Just nothing,” she said. She opened her phone with her thumb-print, then tapped a few buttons to start a torrent download or two.

Another bonus of living so far from everything, while the station was technically in ‘France’ by a certain definition, it was also arguably in international space. Pirating music and videos and books was totally fine. Probably. Honestly, there wasn’t a single lawyer on the station so who was going to make a fuss?

“Hey, did you hear about the footprints?” Anthony asked.

“The what?” she asked absently as she queued up another download.

“It’s a stupid rumour,” Chloe said.

“No, but it’s true,” Anthony said. “I want to go check it out myself. But Drew saw them, and he’s not a liar.”

“What, did a penguin get lost in the station again?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Not a penguin. Human footprints. In the snow.”

“Yeah, that happens when people walk in the snow,” she said.

“Yeah, but these didn’t come from the station, they came from inland. There’s supposed to be three sets of footprints, with like, snowshoes, but not the sort we use here.”

She frowned. That did sound weird. Which probably meant that it was made up. Give a lot of creative people nothing to do and they tended to make up their own fun.

Glancing up from the download bar on her phone, she watched someone run by, then another. A little strange. There wasn’t much to run to on the station. It was all rather enclosed at the best of times.

“Did you hear about Madison?” Chloe asked.

“Hmm? No, what happened?” Jacqueline asked. She wasn’t as interested in hearing the gossip as she was in listening to Chloe talk. The girl had an interesting Italian accent that Jacqueline couldn’t get enough of.

“Okay, so you know how she’s been making eyes at that one guy from the bio team?” Jacquleline nodded along. “Well, guess who might be having lucky baby number thirty?”

“Really?” she gasped as she leaned forwards. “She’s pregnant?”

“Or so the rumours say,” Chloe replied. “I don’t see what she sees in that guy, he’s a bit lanky, you know? But yeah, apparently she vomited in the gym this morning, and she was in the infirmary.”

“Oh my god,” Jacqueline replied.

There weren’t many babies born on the station, only two so far, and those were worrisome events. They had doctors, sure, but they were also about as far from a proper hospital as someone could be.

She was about to ask another question when she heard a distant crack.

“Was that a gun?” Anthony asked.

“Can’t be,” Julia said. “No guns on the station, right?”

Jacqueline raised her head as she noticed someone else running by, then two of the station’s six security officers sprinted across the hall towards the station’s exit. They never made it to the doors before they were smashed open.

For a moment the cafeteria was quiet except for a few startled gasps. A sweeping, chill wind spread through the space, sending a cold shiver down Jacqueline’s spine. Then she saw the thing standing in the doorway and her blood went cold.

It was a man, of course, but one covered in metal armour. Not like some mediaeval knight, but like a walking tank. Thick, heavy steel, painted a dull grey and with a few inner sections made of exposed leather. It was power armour, something she’d only seen in movies and maybe a game or two.

The person within shifted, brought his arm up, and then the cafeteria filled with two incredibly loud bangs. The guard went down, one entirely dead, the other screaming as he clutched his side.

A static-y squeal came from the armour before it started to speak, but Jacqueline didn’t recognize a single word of what he was saying.

Her attention was fixed on the armour’s arm though. There was a red band painted on it, with a white circle, and a disturbingly familiar symbol she’d last seen in a history book.

“Jacqueline, run!” Chloe said.

“Right,” she replied as she took flight. The others ran with her, but her heart sank as she looked back. The armoured man wasn’t alone. More were pouring into the room, in long jackets coated in packed snow, with sub-machine guns held close. They were fanning out already.

They ran across the ring, but halfway around they came upon others running in the opposite direction. She wanted to hide, but the adults insisted they go the other way, away from the danger behind them.

“Come on,” Chloe said. She grabbed Jacqueline’s hand and tugged.

“No, wait, we should--” she began.

FIRE DEFINED THE FIRST MAN. IT GAVE THEM WAR. IT GAVE THEM VENGEANCE. IT GAVE THEM THE FIRST FORGE.

She stumbled, blinking dumbly as the voice receded.

When her focus returned, she found herself staring down the barrel of a gun, the man behind it screaming at her through a full-face mask.

She carefully raised her hands, then protested when he grabbed her by the upper arm and dragged her along. Soon, she found herself being pushed back into a crowd of familiar faces. The people with guns were gesturing down, and shoving those who were too slow to act.

It was surreal. A moment ago she was worried about shitty internet speeds, and now she was trying not to panic as she watched men in eerily familiar uniforms prancing around her home.

She saw her father and mother further down, but she didn’t dare stand to go and see them. One of the men said something, and someone stood up, a woman she only recognized on sight  and whose name she didn’t know.

The woman was brought forward and held back until a man stepped into the cafeteria. He was wearing a black leather coat and a steep-fronted hat. A gun hung by his hip, and he had an armband as well. The man looked like an actor playing the role of some Nazi officer in a cheap movie.

Jacqueline watched as he came up to the woman and spoke to her, the disgust in his face obvious.

She nodded, then said something back in what she guessed was German.

The man replied, then gestured to the crowd.

His new translator swallowed, then spoke in the station’s own strange mix of Italian and French.

“This man says that they are from the New Reich. Um. They want to ask us questions,” she said. “I... I think they want to separate us into men and women, and by... religion too.”

Jacqueline felt a pit open in her stomach. Fear... but just for a moment. It was replaced by a swelling anger a moment later.

CHASTISE REALITY FOR REFUSING TO BEND TO YOU, FOR IT HAS WRONGED YOU, BUT EVEN IT CAN BURN. FOR IT IS WITH FIRE THAT YOU WILL BE TEMPERED, THE FLAME WILL CLEANSE YOUR SOUL. THE BURNING HATRED WILL GUIDE YOU.

She gasped, blinking at the floor and trying to remember when she’d fallen forwards.

The people around her were shuffling back, and as she blinked she realized that there were boots in her vision, sparkly black leather boots.

She raised her head and found the officer glaring down at her. He growled something which sounded threatening, then reached down and grabbed her by the hair.

Wincing, she climbed to her feet while grabbing at his arm. “Let go, you son of a bitch,” she shouted.

The man laughed.

Her gut boiled.

IT IS THROUGH YOUR OWN PASSION THAT YOU WILL ACHIEVE IMMORTALITY. THAT PASSION CHAINS ME. I AM YOUR SERVANT, DENWEN. BRIGHT IS MY RANCOUR.

She swayed, but less than last time. She didn’t know what was going on in her head.

“Eighty years under the ice,” he said. She heard the words in German, but somehow understood them perfectly, though on parsing them, she kind of wished she couldn’t. “And still the French girls are just as pretty. This one will breed a nice new generation of perfect men, don’t you think?”

BOUND BY YOUR HATRED, WITHOUT PAUSE OR REST, I AM CURSED FOREVERMORE TO SERVE YOU AND ONLY YOU. I RELEASE YOUR SOUL, AND BY YOUR OWN ADMISSION, CONDEMN THEE TO BE MY ETERNAL MASTER. IGNITE, BURNING SUPERNOVA.

Jacqueline growled. “That’s a stupid fucking name,” she said. “No, call me... Burning Ultranova.”

Then she exploded, but not before her fist, wreathed in brilliant flames, punched the Nazi in the face.

***

Origin - One - Dimension Death

“Ollie Olivia!”

Olivia grinned, bent her knees a bit, then jumped while twisting her ankle just so. Her board followed her into the air, almost as if it were glued to her feet. Then she came back down, skirt flaring and knees bending with the hard impact of her landing.

Laughing, she leaned backwards and turned around in a big, lazy circle, one hand extending to smack her friends' hands as she went by. There was a smack-smack-smack as she flew past Emma and Mateo and Bruno.

“How are you doing?” she asked as she put a foot down and stopped herself. Her other foot came down on the lip of her deck and threw the board up for her to catch it.

“Hey, not bad,” Bruno said. He gestured at her with a still-smoking joint and she pinched it from him to take a tiny, quick pull.

She didn’t like it too much, it made her lungs itch, but it also made everything a little lighter and funnier, and besides, all of her friends did it.

Olivia passed the joint to Mateo, but he waved her off so she gave it to Emma who took a hit with a smile. “What took you so long?” Emma asked.

“Liam was being a bitch,” she said. It was rude to call their teachers by their first name, so she revelled in every opportunity to do so. “Kept me in to ‘talk about my future’ or whatever." She set her board down on a cement half-wall, then hopped up and sat on its middle, her hips swaying lightly to keep the board level.

“He means well,” Mateo said.

“He’s a self-righteous prick,” Bruno corrected as he took his joint back.

The day was too nice to talk about serious things, Olivia found. The sun was beaming, and it was unusually warm. The skate park was their spot, but they shared it easily enough. There was the all-familiar sound of small wheels whisking across smooth cement or clacking over a familiar crack. Not as many people were out. Maybe it was too warm for some but she loved it.

Every day she could spend outside was a nice one. Home was... well, she liked the sunshine and hanging out a lot more. Winter would roll around soon enough, and then they’d be shivering out here or at someone’s place and... nah, she just liked it better when it was cosy out.

Olivia let her friends chatter while she tilted her head back and stared at the blue above. There were clouds, but they were small, patchy things that she didn’t mind one bit.

Then a warm hand touched her knee. Her leg jerked a little, but she didn’t react beyond that. Her friends kept talking about... some guy called Tobias who’d gone missing? She was playing catch up with the conversation.

The hand slid up, rough and calloused, and it started to push at the hem of her skirt. She felt a disgusted shiver run down her spine. “Bruno,” she said, sharp enough to cut off the conversation. “You take that hand and put it away or I’ll feed you your fingers one at a time.”

Bruno’s hand snapped back. He knew she wasn’t exaggerating.

“Not cool,” Emma said.

Mateo fired a glare at Bruno, but he just shrugged and passed the joint around again.

“What’s that about... Tobias? Who’s Tobias, that name’s familiar,” she said.

“You know that fat kid in my homeroom,” Emma said.

Olivia snorted. “Which one?’

“Always has a book with him. Bit of a loner. Nice guy, I guess,” Emma said.

“He’s alright,” Mateo said. “Took the bus with him a lot for a while. He likes good music.”

“Okay,” Olivia said. “What about him? He drop out, got someone pregnant? What?” She wasn’t keen on gossip, but it kept things happy and kept people talking. She just wanted to bathe in the sun, maybe ride around and practice her moves for a little bit, but she preferred doing that kind of thing with friends around.

Emma shook her head. “Nah. He’s just gone.”

“Missing, like that Maria girl, and like, three others,” Mateo said.

“Wild,” Olivia said. “What is it, like human trafficking?”

Emma let out a shocked laugh. “Where’d you get that idea?”

Olivia’s only reply was a shrug. “Sounds possible, no? Some gross millionaire from somewhere buying people in like, cargo containers or whatever.”

Emma laughed. “You watch too much TV.”

She disagreed, but felt that her idea had some merit. “If it’s not people smugglers, then what? It’s been mixed, right? Boys and girls?”

“Yeah. Some kids too,” Bruno said. “Hey, what’re you doing after this?”

“Nothing,” she said. And it was clear even to someone as thick as Bruno that she meant nothing with him. He’d been pushing his luck lately. Not that he wasn’t usually a nice guy. He didn’t mind sharing his stuff, and threw fun parties, but he was way too... Bruno for her tastes.

Jumping down, Olivia grabbed her board and set it down. “I’m going to spin circles,” she said.

“Have fun,” Emma said. Then she started talking about something else while Olivia pushed off and started to make her way around the park. It wasn’t all that big, just a few small halfpipes and ramps where an old building had burned down half a decade ago.

It was one of those things the municipality added to modernise the city. That was back when she was really young, when things were more... different than they were now.

She went around, faster and faster, more daring as the sun beat down on her and her lips went dry. The way her skirt shifted against her legs, the rhythmic rumble of her wheels sending vibrations up her calves, the little moments when she took to the air and wasn’t sure how she’d stick the landing.

It was nice.

But it came to an end. Bruno invited everyone to his place for drinks and such. She decided not to join them when she learned that Emma wouldn’t be going.

So she rode back home across the sometimes uneven sidewalk bricks to the tight little apartment on the fourth floor of a ten storey building right in the middle of Rosario. No one was home when she arrived, so she checked the kitchen for leftovers, grabbed some asado that no one had touched last Sunday and tossed it in their old microwave.

She eventually grew bored enough to give her homework a try. It was all so easy. Nothing but a waste of time that she couldn’t really stand, but it would make the one or two teachers who actually cared happy and so she bothered.

By the time anyone arrived, she was in bed already, and when someone cracked her door open, she pretended to sleep.

The next day, on arriving at school she discovered that Emma had gone missing too.

It hit her like a rock to the face.

Emma had been a staple for... ever. She was Olivia’s friend, even if their friendship mostly amounted to occasionally being near each other and Olivia listening to Emma. It wasn’t deep, but it was something, and now the girl was gone.

Olivia wasn’t sure what to feel.

She was the only one at the park when school was out. Around and around she went, wishing that the place was bigger, that the cement ground was smoother, that the sky wasn’t so cloudy and heavy with the potential for rain, but she knew that wishes weren’t worth much.

When the first drops came down, she decided to return home.

It turned into a downpour, and by the time she got home to get an earful from her tired mother about bad influences and being irresponsible, she was soaking.

She didn’t bother with homework. Instead she sat in a corner of her tiny room, still dripping from her hair, and she used what tools she had to undo the truck on her board. There was a squeak she’d noticed by feeling alone. What she discovered was a rusty set of bearings that almost crumbled apart when she reached them.

She left everything on the floor and fell into her bed to stare at the ceiling.

It wasn’t worth it.

Olivia eventually succumbed to sleep. Her eyes closed, her still-wet hair stuck to her pillow, and she sank away from everything.

She awoke when something grabbed her leg.

Bolting upright, she tried to see, but it had gone dark, all she could tell was that there was something long and dark reaching out from beneath her bed and grabbing at her leg. Her dream-fogged mind forgot to scream until a second hand reached around the end of her bed and grabbed her face.

Of course, she screamed anyway. It was only in movies that covering someone’s mouth stopped them from screaming.

The hands didn’t care, they pulled, and Olivia fought them. She hooked her free leg around the opposite end of her mattress and grabbed the hand over her mouth. It was disgusting, oily and slick and too warm.

She didn’t know what was happening, but she knew that she didn’t want it to happen at all.

YET AS THE MIGHTY RISE TO GREAT HEIGHTS AND IMPOSSIBLE POWER, THEY ARE OVERSHADOWED BY THEIR OWN POTENTIAL.

Olivia pulled her face back and gasped as she gained just a little bit of space around the hand digging long fingers into her cheek and jaws.

Then another hand came and grabbed her hard by the thigh and she screamed.

The voice in her head continued.

FOR IN INFINITE REALMS ACROSS INFINITE DIMENSIONS, EVEN THE MIGHTIEST OF TITANS IS FELLED. POTENTIAL IS EVER RECURSIVE. UNENDING. EXCEPT BY THE HAND OF THE DEATH OF DIMENSIONS.

She fell off the side of her bed, and as she was turned to be pulled under, she saw. There was a whole disgusting world under her bed. Many faces stared at her, pale and emaciated, with arms that were far too long.

They looked excited, eager.

She needed a weapon.

WIELD ME. CUT THROUGH THE CHAFF. FREE YOURSELF OF THIS MUNDANITY OR CHASE GREATER CHALLENGES. I CARE NOT. I AM INTERMUNDIA, THE WORLD CUTTER. I AM THE BLADE OF DEATH’S SCYTHE REFORGED. TAKE ME, AND TOGETHER WE WILL BE THE END OF UNIVERSES.

As she pressed her knee against the top of her bed and tried to stop herself from being pulled in, something cool and... reassuringly familiar fell into her hand. It was the same feeling she had when handling her board. A tool, a toy, a thing she knew well.

She sliced.

The arm gripping her face fell away in two halves, the skin and bone flaking apart as dust.

Reaching down, she flipped the knife around and stabbed at the hand grabbing her thigh. Then the one around her leg pulled, and she was almost dragged under the bed.

It was instinct that had her lashing out, not at the hands, but at the lip of the impossible space beneath.

DIE.

The voice resounded in her mind and in that fraction of a moment, the world changed.

She was on the floor, halfway under her bed, panting hard and covered in sweat, her thigh and face and ankle stung a little where they’d been squeezed.

The door to her room opened, and she got an earful from her mom who seemed too sleepy to even focus on the inside of Olivia’s room enough to tell that something was wrong.

Then the door shut, and she fell back, head thumping against the floor.

She could almost dismiss it all as a horrid nightmare.

But the knife was still in her head. A long, sleek thing, with a blood-red blade and a handle of leather and carefully sculpted gold inlays that felt right in her hand, as if it was tailored just for her.

Olivia wasn’t one to question things too deeply, but... “Are you... Intermundia?” she asked, remembering the voice.

I AM.

“And what the hell was that?”

VISITORS FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION. THE HUNGRY WHO WISH TO FEED BEYOND THEIR OWN BORDERS. THOSE WHOM, SHOULD YOU CHOOSE IT, SHALL BE PUNISHED FOR THEIR HUBRIS.

Olivia pulled herself out from under her bed and just... sat on the floor for a moment, staring at the knife. It should have looked evil and malevolent, being all curved and sharp and somehow so real. But it wasn’t.

“What does that make me?” she asked.

YOU ARE MAGICAL GIRL DIMENSION DEATH. THE INHERITOR OF THE DEMISE OF ALL. THE WARDEN OF THIS REALITY. ETERNAL MAY YOU REIGN.

“Oh,” she muttered.

Well, that explained nothing, but she could live with that.

***

Origin - One - Hypertense Breakpoint

Amira had been hearing a voice for well over a week now, and she was quite certain that she wasn’t going mad.

The voice wasn’t one that she’d ever heard before. It was loud, it was brash, and it didn’t sound like any voice she’d heard before. Maybe it wasn’t really a voice, and instead was more of a constant scream that only she could hear.

It was always saying the same thing.

BREAK.

She wasn’t sure what it meant. What she was certain of, was that she wouldn’t be telling anyone about it. The last thing she needed was to give people more reasons to condescend to her. She didn’t have the worst life, but hers wasn’t easy either.

That morning she was woken up by the now-familiar voice screaming in her mind.

BREAK.

She sighed, climbed off her bed, then rushed through her morning ablutions and picked up the homework she’d left on her little room’s tiny desk. It was all complete, but she’d left herself a nice mess to pick up.

It was Friday, which meant classes in the morning, then work in the afternoon. She packed clothes for work in her pack then changed into her normal daywear for school. Then she entered her home’s chaotic main room. A few of her siblings were up already. Her hard-working mom was working in the kitchen, preparing breakfast for the men. Amira stole a piece of toast meant for one of her brothers, then she kissed her mom on the cheek.

“Be careful,” her mom warned.

“I will,” she said.

The run to school was just that, a quick jog through the foggy morning air of Cairo. She didn’t want to be on the streets when visibility was low, especially not alone. Not that she had many people to rely on at the best of times. Amira always had some trouble making friends, or even just holding conversations with people that didn’t turn impolite.

School... happened. She paid attention to the teachers, minded her own business, and spent the break time alone with a book or two, never entirely on her own--it was stupid for a girl reaching sixteen to be all alone--but never in any group, just on the outskirts.

As soon as she was free from school, she ran across the city towards the nicer, more tourist-heavy parts, with only a stop at Uncle Gamal’s place (one of her many, many uncles) to use private washrooms in his shop to get changed into her work uniform.

She kept her hair just long enough to be respectable, but with a workcap on and an ill-fitting uniform she could pass herself off as an awkward boy. She didn’t like it, but it helped keep things neat and kept the harassment to a minimum.

Uncle ‘Momo’ had been a family friend since forever, and he was glad to have her helping at his place which sold small China-made statues of the pyramids and other touristy crap to gullible passersby. They were on the wrong end of the city for that, but they still somehow got a regular clientele. It helped that there was a smaller airport nearby that often had fresh people coming into the city.

Everyone, it seemed, needed some cheap trinket to bring home to prove that they’d visited the city.

She didn’t understand it, but she kept an eye on thieves and manned the till all the same. She was impeccably honest, and Uncle Momo made sure to reward that on occasion, it was why she kept the job here instead of finding work at one of those American food chains that sprouted up like mice out of cracks in the walls.

SOON, YOU WILL BREAK.

She jumped, which made the customer before her glance up before she made a dismissive gesture. That was a new one, the voice had never spoken more than one word.

The evening was quieter. She had time to do some of her homework. Voices in her head were nice and all, but she had a million other concerns that outweighed that by a lot. Like keeping her grades high enough to get into a good school after highschool.

It wouldn’t be easy, but her family always spoke at length about how they’d always pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

All she needed was a chance, but that chance wasn’t going to come without her working for it.

Uncle Momo showed up to see how things were going, with a bit of sauce in his beard and more down the front of his shirt. He gave her back a hearty smack, thanked her for her hard work, and paid her for the day.

She hid the money in a shoe and headed out.

It was about the time of day when a lot of people were heading home, so the streets were quite busy. She kept to those that were busiest with foot traffic. It risked a pickpocket, but hers were empty, and she looked local besides.

It was the nice tourists with the smart phones and the Rolexes that were at risk. If they stole her homework, she wouldn’t shed a tear.

Her mind was on her plans for the evening and the weekend, which weren’t too exciting. She could, and should, earn a bit more over the weekend.

She was still thinking to herself when something changed in the crowd. She perked up, going on high alert for a moment. She reached to her shoulder. There was a tiny knife hidden in a strap-pocket of her backpack.

The people around her were talking to themselves, but a lot had stopped in their tracks. A number of them were pointing to the sky, and she heard more than one prayer slip past lips. Of course, she followed their gaze.

It took a moment to realise what she was seeing.

It was a haze. A shimmer in the sky, like heat over the desert sands, but more localised. It was triangular as well.

Her mind jumped to a heap of logical conclusions. Some sort of strange weather pattern, a weird reaction in the black smog that often coated the city, maybe even drones. She’d caught a glimpse of a show put on by hundreds of those all coordinated together once.

Then a piercing scream sounded out, and Amira was stuck in the press of the crowd. She stumbled back, tripped over the lip of the sidewalk, and landed on all fours on the dusty road.

Fortunately, the traffic was as congested as always.

She stood and glanced around, then she caught sight of something truly bizarre. A woman was flying.

No, she was being pulled off the ground, and rapidly. She faded into the haze just as another was torn off the ground some ways away, a young girl kicking and screaming.

Amira swallowed, stood, then ran.

She didn’t make it far before she heard a strange hum and the hairs on the back of her neck came to stand on end.

BREAK IT.

She ran harder, but something grabbed her, and with a gasp she was torn off the road and into the air, arms flailing.

Her backpack went flying, and for an irrational moment she was angry that she’d lost her homework. More pressing concerns took over as she was grabbed, twisted, then shoved to the side. She kicked and lashed out, but her arms were pulled to her sides, something was pressed to her face, and the world went blurry a moment before she was plunged into a murky green liquid.

She fought harder to escape, but to no avail. Her heart hammered in her chest, and she squirmed, or tried to, but the restraints around her hands kept her locked in place.

Then she opened her eyes to a corridor lit in frigid green light.

Or, perhaps more accurately, one made green by the liquid she was in.

Ahead of her, floating in a large tube, was a woman a few years her senior, her face covering hanging around her neck while a mask pressed in around her lower face. She looked asleep.

Amira turned her head as much as she could, but there was only so much she could move without losing the mask. Whatever it fed her burned her lungs, but some instinct as old as humanity told her not to lose it, for fear of drowning.

She was surrounded by tanks. Hundreds of them, in neat rows. Many empty, many not. Those that weren’t had girls in them, from young teens to young women, in all manner of dress, but mostly in clothes she could recognize as local.

BREAK.

She swallowed back her panic and closed her eyes against the liquid’s burn.

BREAK!

The voice was insistent, louder than it had ever been, so much so that it felt like a bass going off in her skull. It pushed away the drowsiness that she only now noticed was overtaking her.

Were they putting her to sleep?

BREAK!

She sensed motion and ripped her eyes open again. The pain was awful, like termites in her eyes, but she endured it.

There was an alien ahead of her. A creature with a large head and thin, nearly skeletal body in a strange outfit.

Under different circumstances, she would have laughed at the absurdity.

BREAK!

“How?” she wanted to scream back.

It was her first time replying to the voice.

FIND THE WEAKNESS.

Another new sentence. She struggled some more. She didn’t understand. The world was growing foggy, her vision darkening in the corners.

INHERENT IN ALL IMPERFECTION IS FAILURE. YOU ARE THE BRINGER OF THE IMPERFECT’S END. THE BREAKER.

That didn’t explain anything!

There was a shadow before her, and she blinked. The alien was there, staring into her tank.

LET ALL THAT IS CREATED BY MAN, DEMON AND GOD BE KNOWN TO YOU, BARONESS OF DESTRUCTION AND SHATTERING QUEEN. LET THE ONLY PERFECTION BE THE ONE YOU ALLOW, FOR YOU ALONE SHALL BE SHE WHO ALLOWS PASSAGE TO THE BROKEN. YOU ARE ONLY RESTRAINED BY MORTAL MEANS.

She clung onto that last part. Mortal means. The aliens were mortal? Human-like? So were their machines then. She was able to breathe and think, she had resisted the pull of sleep. They’d failed, somewhere, at some point.

All she needed was for them to fail again. For her to find her chance to pull herself up by her bootstraps.

She started to struggle again, through the hurt. She realized that the liquid was an acid. It was eating at her clothes. Some of her own hair was in the acid. Her eyes... didn’t matter at the moment. She used them to glare at the blur she thought was the alien.

The clasp holding her right arm in place snapped. Metal, which had changed temperatures too often in too short a time, failed in a million microscopic ways, and her tugging, the tension she put on it, was all it needed to break.

SHATTER, SMASH, CRACK AND FRACTURE. ALL THINGS WILL MEET DESTRUCTION AS YOU WILL IT.

She rocked her hand back and punched at the glass.

The blur jumped back. She’d scared the alien.

Judging by the sting, she’d ripped the skin of her knuckle too.

That didn’t stop her from pulling her arm back again, even as her vision went dark. She punched the glass, and the entire tube rang.

THEY KNEW YOU WOULD BE HERE. THEY KNEW THE THREAT YOU POSE. DESPAIR DRIVES THEM TO BREAK THE BREAKER, BUT YOU WILL FIND THE POINT TO STRESS, THE FAULT IN THE MACHINE, THE RATTLE IN THE LUNGS AND THE BIAS OF THE MIND, AND THROUGH THESE IMPERFECTIONS YOU WILL UNLOCK YOUR OWN POTENTIAL.

Another punch. Another ring as the juices she was in sloshed around.

A crack. Tiny, imperceptible. She saw it anyway, even with eyes that couldn’t see. Her fist smashed into it knuckle first.

The alien ran away as the front of the tube exploded outwards. Her mask was ripped off, and before she knew it she crashed onto a grated floor, panting, blind, in agony, but free.

“Who are you?” she asked. In her mind, she asked herself who she was as well.

YOU ARE HYPERTENSE BREAKPOINT. I AM UNMAKER, YOUR WEAPON, YOUR HAMMER. I DELIGHT IN THE DESTRUCTION WE SHALL DELIVER.

And then she saw it all. No, it wasn’t seeing, it was knowing. Every imperfection in herself. Every flaw. Physical, mental, spiritual. Every tiny mistake that came together to make her who she was.

SHATTER.

That was a command, but also a suggestion.

She obeyed.

“Shatter,” she repeated.

Amari broke.

In her place, rising from the ground with the remains of the equipment holding her falling off, was a girl in orange, a hammer that outweighed her in one hand. She blinked, then her eyes narrowed and she reached up to adjust her new hat.

The world around her was nothing but a collection of cracks, each a point standing out like a nail, and she had a hammer that was wanting to be used.

***

Origin - One - Feasting Carnage

Alma wished she was home.

Home was safe. Home had food.

She shook her head and was determined not to think about her hunger. Instead, she blinked a few times and swept a branch out of her path, then paused to listen.

The forest was quiet. Not entirely, but enough that it unnerved her. There were occasional caws and the sounds of birds chirping, but it was always a quick burst of noise that faded away.

She was wary of approaching any of them.

Earlier, a large raven had landed on a low branch just a few metres ahead of her. It was longer than her forearm, and its weight made the branches of the ancient aspen it perched upon creak. It had looked at her, first with a bird’s eye, then once it turned its head, with a human one.

She was determined not to be seen, not to draw attention to herself.

This wasn’t Sweden. This wasn’t her quiet little city. Or if it was, it was a twisted, warped version of it, where the touch of humanity was missing entirely.

The sky turned from dawn to dusk, the light and shadows turning around as if the entire world was spinning a million times faster than usual. She stayed rooted where she was, partially hidden by some bushes and a few large trees.

It wasn’t the first time that had happened

This place wasn’t governed by the same rules as Earth.

Alma swallowed, looked around herself to make sure she wasn’t being watched, then she pressed a hand against her stomach. She was so hungry.

How long had she been here? She wasn’t sure. Days, certainly.

It had all started by accident. Alma came back from school, annoyed by the amount of homework they gave out now that she was in year seven. Her family lived above their shop, a little candy and pastry store that she helped at when she could.

Her mormor had asked her to go out and buy a few bags of flour, and Alma couldn’t refuse the older lady.

It was strange, going to school doing normal things like biking across town, especially now that... she put it out of her mind.

There was talk in town of people going missing lately. Men, women, and a few children. The police were on the case, but rumours were spreading fast, and people were a little worried about it. That kind of thing didn’t happen in their little city, not for a long, long time.

Mormor told her to be careful as she left, and she’d agreed easily.

The bike to the grocers wasn’t long. Just a few streets. Her mistake was taking a shortcut, a direct path through the little park in the middle of the city.

There was a ring of mushrooms there. She’d thought it was strange. She still biked through it.

Now her bike was... maybe two days behind her? Abandoned somewhere in the endless forest.

She had to find a way out of here. All she had to help her were a few camping trips when she was much younger, and maybe her trump card. She wasn’t sure of it yet. She didn’t want to use it. Her life was nice, peaceful even.

Well, it was. Now she wasn’t so sure.

“You seem a little lost.”

“Finally,” she muttered.

Turning, Alma reached into the pocket of her jeans and removed her only weapon. She held it in the palm of her hand, index of the points on its end, the handle against her wrist. She was nervous, of course. The hunger wasn’t helping. Everything felt light, as if her mind was floating.

Standing a few metres back was a smiling man. He was no taller than most, and he wore a simple blue hoodie and jeans, but his shoes were missing. She had to correct herself when she looked at his face though. The man wasn’t smiling. His teeth were showing, and his lips were turned up, but that expression wasn’t a smile.

“You’re... Lars?” she tried. “I saw your posters.”

“Oh, those weren’t mine,” he said.

The conversation was barely three sentences old, and already it was bizarre. She knew his face though. It was one of the first to show up around her city on posters and on the local news. Lars somethingson. He was a father of three who’d gone missing out of nowhere.

She remembered the day it happened. It was an important day for her, though not because of this man.

“Now, if you don’t mind, dear, could you give me your name?”

Alma felt the hairs on the back of her neck rising. “I’m afraid I’d rather keep it,” she said. “But if you need something to call me, then... how about hungry?”

“Hungry?” he asked. His head tilted to one side. The angle was too much to be entirely natural. “Oh, you poor thing, you’ve been going in circles for so long that you must be quite famished!”

“Circles?” she asked.

He nodded, then gestured to the side.

Carefully, without letting him slip out of her line of sight, she followed his gesture. It was towards a large bush, one that she’d moved over her bike a while ago. Her bike was still there, undisturbed.

“How long have I been walking in circles?” she asked.

“Long enough to work up an appetite!” he said cheerfully. “But you’re not the only one who’s a little hungry. I think I could use a meal myself.”

Alma shrugged. “I’ll survive,” she said. Her stomach rumbled in discontent, but she ignored it. “Who are you?”

“You won’t give me your name, but you ask for mine?” the man said. “That’s not very polite.”

“I’m a little too hungry for politeness, I think,” Alma returned. “If who isn’t good then... what?”

The man grinned and clapped. “Oh, good, good. As smart as you are hungry, aren’t you?”

She didn’t reply, instead she kept her focus on the man, and on the weapon held in her hand. It was just a fork. A very special fork, but a fork all the same. At the moment, she imagined that it might be her only way out.

“I,” he said. “Am just as hungry as you. Hungrier, even. And my friends and I have discovered a whole realm of tasty morsels.”

“Your friends?” she asked.

He smiled, then gestured to the side.

There was someone there. Something, maybe. It was as tall as Alma, with plain colourless eyes and pale, cold-looking skin. It was also nude, though a quick and rather embarrassed glance down revealed that it was entirely sexless, not dissimilar to the dolls she’d once played with.

“Are you fae?” she asked.

“We are,” the first with the face of a man said.

“And did you take that man, the one whose face you’re wearing?” she asked next.

His face twisted in a facsimile of a smile again. “We asked for permission, of course. And showered him with gifts. Why, we could do the same for you.” He reached to the small of his back, then pulled his hand around. He was holding a small piece of candy, wrapped in pink plastic with a familiar logo on its side.

Her stomach twisted itself into knots. “Is that a joke?” she asked.

“Isn’t everything?” he asked with a laugh.

The other thing laughed too. Its voice was plain, so neutral it hurt.

“Why are you attacking my city?” she asked. “Why are you taking people?”

“My, so many questions,” he said. “Usually the people we meet at least have the decency to pay us with a little fear. You’re quite the strange girl.”

“Perhaps the duchess would want to meet her?” the strange one without any noticeable features said.

“Oh, I doubt it,” he replied with a dismissive little wave. “Let’s give her a few more turns around the grove.”

“It will make the body bony,” the other said.

“Ah, but it will make the mind pliable as well! Besides, bones make for great flutes.”

Alma had heard enough.

A couple of weeks ago she’d heard a voice. It happened early in the morning, after she’d woken up. She was still going through her morning ablutions, and was eager for Mormor’s breakfast when the voice hit her.

ARE YOU HUNGRY, SHE WHO FEASTS?

At the time, she thought she’d gone entirely mad.

But Alma was a pragmatic, if simple girl. She knew she wasn’t the smartest, the fastest, the prettiest. She settled on being the girl who was prepared and who took things in stride.

So, of course, she addressed the voice in the privacy of her own bedroom. “Who the fuck are you?”

I AM YOUR SWORN STAFF. THE SATIATING SPEAR, THE TINES OF GLUTTONY. THE FORK OF KILGORE. BUT YOU, THE DEVOURER, YOU MAY CALL ME PRONGS.

Alam had blinked, confused. “You’re a fork?”

ONE WHO DEVOURS AND MAKES HER ADVERSARIES HER OWN, NEEDS THE PROPER TOOL TO CONSUME. I AM THAT TOOL.

“Oh, fuck me, I’m a magical girl, aren’t I?” she asked with growing horror. She’d watched the news. She’s seen some of them. Rending Nightmare in Brazil, wiping out a demon army. Burning Ultranova lighting an entire hidden Nazi site on fire then bragging about it on the news while her hair burned. Happy Sparkles... she shuddered. “Look, I’m just a normal girl. I’m not built for this kind of fuckery.”

YOU ARE FAR FROM NORMAL. YOU WILL FEAST UPON THY ENEMY AND TAKE THEIR STRENGTH AS YOUR OWN. FOR STARVATION IS THE ROOT OF ALL WEAKNESS. THE LACK OF WHAT IS NECESSARY TO SURVIVE. NEVER AGAIN SHALL YOU BE WEAK. DEVOUR. CONSUME. GLUT YOURSELF ON POWER AND CARVE YOUR WAY TO SURVIVAL.

“Fuck me,” she muttered.

Since then, nothing had happened. Until now, at least.

She raised her hand, revealing what she held to the fae. “I’ll make a deal with you,” she said.

He was listening intently. “Oh? And what will this deal be?”

“Not you,” she said. “You’ve eaten a man’s face. That’s really fucked up. You I’m going to kill. But you, you look less messed up.” She turned to the other. “If you tell me everything I want to know, I’ll spare you.”

“Little Miss, it is quite improper to threaten someone you’ve only just met. Even if you are threatening them with mere cutlery.”

“I thought the fae didn’t like iron,” she said.

“That fork is silver,” he replied. “That’s more for werewolves.”

She nodded. Made sense. And it was good to know those were real too. “Well, whatever. Prongs. Devour.”

There was a snap, like someone tugging on both ends of a belt loop. It echoed through the forest, and Alme saw both fae jump at the loud, unnatural sound. Then the man before her looked down, his eyes widening.

Her fork was embedded in his gut. It was also now more of a staff with a fork’s head than a mere piece of cutlery. The entire thing was as long as she was tall, and its tines glinted sharply in the every shifting light of the forest.

The fae looked up, confusion on his stolen face.

Alma brushed a hand down the side of her dress. She quite liked it. It was flowy and soft, comfortable and easy to move in without being revealing. It was a very practical outfit, she found.

I CONSUME.

She nodded to the voice and tightened her grip on Prongs.

The fae started to scream a moment before his everything was pulled into the fork, bones were crushed, flesh melted, and in a thousandth of a second, he was gone.

Alma closed her eyes. She was... satiated, for the moment. When she opened them again, the forest had changed. She could see the fine threads of fae magics running across the air, she could see the way the trees and grass fed into a complex, living network of magic that she only barely understood.

“Well then, about that deal?” she asked the other fae. At a glance, she knew it was trying to hide, something the fae could easily do within its own little glade. But she was part-changeling now too. And if she ate this one too, she’d only grow moreso.

Alma knelt and plucked the piece of candy stolen from her home. She inspected it for a moment, then unrolled the package and plopped it into her mouth.

When she next spoke, it was with a mouthful of taffy. “So? You going to talk? Or will I have to eat your secrets out of you? I think you’ve wasted enough of my time, don’t you?”

***

Origin - One - Silenced Annihilation

Before today, Eleanor would have said that she was rather ambivalent about mimes in general. She’d seen them around, of course. This was Paris, France, there were at least a dozen schools and theatres that taught people how to mime, and she’d seen them in the more touristy parts of the city doing their acts and mimeing their own business.

She’d once dressed as a mime for a costume party, even. Though that was when she was much younger and less aware of what people thought of her disability.

On her way to school that particular morning, she noticed a number of mimes out on the streets, way, way more than usual, but she chalked it up to a strange event or something. Maybe it was graduation time for all of Paris’ mime schools?

The fact that the mimes were holding up signs that said ‘Up with the Mime-archy!’ and silently protesting something just added to that impression.

She made it to school safely enough and dismissed it all without a second thought. She was in her third year of highschool, and things were getting a little complicated. One of her teachers had left for maternity leave, which meant that her French class was being taught by a substitute who didn’t know sign language.

He was a bit of a bumbling idiot, and had called out on her to answer questions aloud, twice. The first time she could forgive. Sure, there was probably a note somewhere in her file that mentioned that she was mute, but he should have remembered for the second time.

Then when he talked to her, he’d enunciate everything carefully and speak up much louder.

She was very tempted to show him the most-commonly used bit of sign-language in the world, but she refrained. He was just an idiot.

Her mom had told her a lot about those.

Eleanor had, to put it in only a few words, the best mom.

Her mom was a hard working woman, a secretary for a political office at the Assemblée nationale, a job which kept her up late. And yet she still had time for Eleanor.

Eleanor tried to be a model daughter, because that’s what her mom deserved. She was born with a tumour that had to be operated on, and that operation left her mute, something they’d only really pieced together when Eleanor was a couple of years old, though the doctors had warned her mom that it was a possibility.

The first thing her mom did was learn sign language and she taught it to Eleanor too. Then she found her friends who were deaf or mute, so that she wouldn’t ever feel alone.

She was with a couple of those now. Eric, Samantha, and a few others who were all in the same year in the same public school. Their own little clique of friends who were there to support each other.

“Hey, Elea,” Samantha said, poking Eleanor out of her reverie. French class had just finished and she was still packing her things away.

“What?” she signed to Samantha. The girl was mostly deaf, which she’d joked made her mostly useful to her friends. She could still speak aloud, even if there was a bit of an accent to it, and, of course, she could interpret Eleanor.

“Did you see all the mimes?” Samantha asked. She half-signed, a strange quirk that only worked some of the time. It took Samantha speaking over herself for Eleanor to understand the word ‘mime.’

She placed her things on her desk, then answered. “I saw them in the street.”

Samantha nodded. “Me too, but now they’re all over. Wait, look at this.” She fished her phone out of her pocket--they weren’t allowed phones in class, but the substitute didn’t seem to know that, and Samantha had pulled off the ‘I desperately need this to communicate’ move a couple of times.

She tapped a few things after swiping her thumb across the screen to unlock it.

Eric walked over and looked to Eleanor. He quirked his eyebrows, then glanced at Samantha and back.

Eleanor shrugged, then gestured “mimes.”

Eric looked even more confused at that, and she held back a giggle while leaning over Samantha’s shoulder. If she couldn’t see his reaction, then he couldn’t reply, and she wouldn’t laugh at his face. She really disliked her own laugh.

There was a news article on the screen, all text and pulled from what looked like the France reddit page, which Samantha spent too much time on in Eleanor’s humble opinion. She stared at the headline. Mimes Take Over Assemblée Nationale.

She tugged the phone out of Samantha’s hand and brought it closer to her face, then she started reading the comments below, which were always more informative and less accurate than whatever article was linked.

A pit grew in her stomach as she continued to read.

Eric tapped her arm and she looked up to see him sign at her. “Doesn’t your mom work there?”

She nodded, then handed the phone back to Samantha. “I need to go,” she said.

Eric and Samantha shared a look. “I’m coming,” Samantha said aloud and by sign.

“Me too,” Eric replied.

Eleanor shook her head, but she grabbed her stuff and walked out of the room all the same, aware that her friends were behind her the entire time. She found her locker, stuffed her stuff, then found her phone.

There was no reason to panic yet.

She texted her mom.

For all she knew, her mom was out for lunch when... whatever happened happened. Or maybe she got out? She was just a secretary, not some important political-type.

No one answered the text. She chewed on her lip, then tried to call. They were both in the city, and had internet access, they could video call if she found a place to set her phone down, but that didn’t end up mattering since no one answered.

She shoved her phone into a pocket and turned back to her friends. “I’m worried,” she signed.

“Yeah we get it,” Samanatha said. She slung on her backpack. “Which is why we’re going, right?” she asked the last to Eric who quickly signed back that he hadn’t heard. “That’s a yes from him.”

Eleanor smiled, then signed a quick thank-you before grabbing her coat. Technically, they weren’t supposed to leave the school at all. Also technically, the lonesome teacher guarding the exit couldn’t understand them when they all came up to them, signed nonsense, then walked out of the school’s side door while looking like they were totally allowed to just leave.

There were some small advantages to being unable to communicate sometimes.

“Where now?” Eric signed.

“The subway,” she signed back. There was a line that would bring them relatively close to the place where her mom worked, and she had her metrocard. The nearest entrance was two blocks down from her school, then all they had to do was follow the signs leading to some of the more touristy locations in the centre of the city.

The entire time, Samantha was on her phone, having mastered the ability to watch her screen while allowing Eric or Eleanor to drag her along.

Samantha tugged on Eleanor’s coat once they were in a metro car and handed her the phone. There were images of the police encircling an ancient stone building, lights flashing and men shouting through loud-speakers.

Strangely enough, the mimes that surrounded the building were just... standing there with their arms raised at shoulder-height.

Were they just robbers? Terrorists playing some strange game? If so, they’d have been better off wearing masks instead of white face-paint.

“Do you think they’ll call in a magical girl for this?” Eric asked.

Samantha scoffed, then Eleanor wasn’t able to see her phone anymore as she signed with it in-hand. “Please. As if. The closest is Eating Butcher. No one wants her here.”

Eleanor translated the sign name to Feasting Carnage, and she kind of agreed. All of the magical girls were very... intense.

The metro slowed, and they debarked near the Invalides stop where there were a surprising number of people going in the opposite direction as them. Maybe it wasn’t all that surprising, they were heading away from the trouble she was pushing towards.

The moment they were back outside she checked her phone again. No messages, no missed calls from being underground.

Samantha tugged her along, and she followed, letting the girl take the lead while she bumped shoulders with Eric. “It’ll be okay,” he signed.

She smiled, but there was still a pit in her stomach. Something felt different, wrong, and she didn’t know what it was.

They turned around an intersection and found a crowd of rubber-neckers gathering right in the middle of the road. It would have been dangerous if the road wasn’t blocked off by a dozen police cars.

The officers seemed torn between keeping the crowd at bay and facing the Assemblée Nationale where she could just barely make out a few mimes standing along the sidewalk.

“What’s going on?” Samantha asked.

They moved closer, squeezing through the crowd while dodging elbows and swears until the three of them popped out at the front, just before the line of police with riot shields and white-red police tape.

The crowd was rather silent, though she heard plenty of questions flying about. No one seemed to know what was happening. It was worrying. Was her mom in there? If she wasn’t, would she call Eleanor? What if she ran out but left her phone behind?

Then, someone threw a rock and it sailed across the air towards the nearest mime. People gasped. The rock smacked against something, just in front of the mime’s face without a noise, then clattered to the ground.

There was a collective pause as dozens of people wondered if they saw what they thought they did.

“No way,” Samantha muttered.

“What was that?” Eric signed, but Eleanor had no more ideas than he did.

Someone else tossed something, then a bottle went flying. The police shouted and shook their shields and made noise, which quieted everyone down, but not before they saw that bottle explode against nothing.

The mime’s weren’t just miming something, they were holding up a wall. Was it some sort of technology, or was it magic? A year ago she would have dismissed it as a trick, but that was a whole year ago.

The crowd was excited now, and she felt it too.

They settled down after a minute of not much happening. As it turned out, sieges could be a little boring from the outside.

Things grew more exciting as the doors at the front of the Assemblée Nationale opened and a troupe of mimes stepped out. Behind them, walking with their hands together as though they were handcuffed, were a bunch of hostages. They had their heads down, and they stumbled along with little steps spurred on by a mime who was miming holding a rifle.

Eleanor  gasped, eyes locking onto the brunette near the front row of hostages. Her makeup had run, and she’d lost a shoe, but that was undeniably her mother.

The mimes moved to the front of the building, and then one of them brought a sweating, nervous man forwards and shoved a piece of paper into his hands. The mime mimed orating and reading to the crowd, then poked the man in the ribs.

The man lifted the paper and read, but no one could hear it from afar, so a second mime came and made gestures as if tapping a microphone. It made a loud thumping noise from nowhere in particular. The mime placed the mimed microphone in a mimed microphone stand, then moved the man closer to it and adjusted the invisible device.

The man swallowed “Um,” he said, and this time, his voice carried.

SOCIETY IS A CAGE.

She jumped. Had that come from the man? But no, he hadn’t spoken yet.

“The, ah, servants of the Great Silent One wish to, um, inform the people of Paris and France, that from today onwards, they will be instituting a new form of rule. A Mime-archy. Long may the new France live in silent prosperity.”

The mime nearest the man smacked him behind the head, then pointed to something on the page and mimes filling his lungs and speaking up.

“Oh. Uh. Long may the new France live in Silent Prosperity!” the man repeated, this time with more false enthusiasm.

The two mimes at the front made so-so gestures.

“What is he saying?” Eric asked.

Samantha started to translate, long used to the role.

Eleanor was still trying to discover where that voice had come from. It didn’t seem to be from the mimes or the person speaking.

THE SILENTLY OPPRESSED LIVE BEHIND BARS OF WROUGHT PIG-IRON OR GILDED SILVER, BUT THEY LIVE BEHIND BARS ALL THE SAME.

There it was again. She poked Samantha and asked her if she heard anything, but the girl shook her head and continued to translate for Eric. The speech was going on, but now Eleanor couldn’t focus on it.

YOU ARE THE ONE WHO BREAKS.

She shook her head as two and two came together, and she started to have a terrible idea of what was happening. But no, that meant that something awful was about to happen, didn’t it?

Samantha and a few others gasped.

“And... and to prove our intentions and their seriousness, we... we will rid Paris of its current rulers,” the man read, voice halting and scared.

Two mimes stepped up and grabbed one of the hostages and dragged them forwards. They were shoved to their knees, head lowering. Another mime came in and mimed placing a basket down.

The hostage understood before most of the crowd did, and he started to fight back.

A mime pulled an invisible lever. The hostage’s head tumbled down and rolled in an invisible basket.

Eleanor slapped her hands over her face. She felt faint, blood draining from her as she watched what was clearly impossible.

The mimes kicked the body aside, then grabbed another hostage. Her mom.

I AM DELEO, CREATED TO GUIDE YOUR ULTIMATE DESTRUCTION. FOR IN THE TIME OF CREATION, ALL KNEW THAT DESTRUCTION NEEDED A PLACE. THAT POWER OVER MATTER AND ALL OF EXISTENCE MUST BE HELD IN THE HANDS OF A

Her mom was shoved down.

“Please be quiet!” she signed, tears clinging to the corner of her eyes.

There was a loud beat of silence.

The voices of the crowd ceased, wind quieted its murmur, the scuff of shoes and rumble of cars faded away. The world respected her demand for quiet. And in that quiet came a scintillating flash of yellow-white light which wrapped itself around Eleanor.

DESTROY, SILENCED ANNIHILATION, AS IS YOUR RIGHT ALONE.

She raised her hand, and in it sat a wand of smooth wood which she pointed ahead of her.

There was no more sound to her attack than there was to anything else. One moment there was a bright burst of white light, a searing yellow beam. The next, the upper half of the mimes holding her mother down were gone.

And so was a hole the size of a semi-trailer in the front of the Assemblée Nationale.

She really hoped her mom would overlook that last part because she wanted to be a good daughter, and good French daughters didn’t blow up cultural heritage sites.

***

Origin - One - Phantom Mist

Today, they were hanging out at one of the cricket fields just a couple of blocks down from the apartment her family lived in. This wasn’t one of the nice parts of Cape Town, but it wasn’t the worst either.

Neliswa knew these streets as well as any girl. She knew who to avoid, when to keep her head down, and that using any sort of public transport was as good as kissing her ass goodbye.

She only wished that her moronic little brother knew that much too.

A few weeks ago she caught him talking to some boys who weren’t any good. The sort that flashed their wealth and their criminal ties with equal ease.

There was nothing good that could come from making friends like that. The best thing to do was knuckle down, shut up, mind your own, and work hard.

She’d seen it work, she’d seen some people pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They didn’t go far, not in Cape Town, but there was better to be had than a life on the streets. Which is why, when she caught her brother, she was going to beat his hide until it glowed for wasting her time.

Neliswa perked up as the guys hanging out by the cricket field picked up their stuff and started to head out. She followed, of course. Staying out of their line of sight when she could and keeping around corners when that was tricky.

Years of living on the city’s edge, with a few run-ins with troublesome sorts, had taught her to keep a good eye on her surroundings. Some called her a bit twitchy, but they shut up after she gave their shin a good workout.

The idiots were heading further out of the nicer part of the city and towards the coast. That wasn’t a good thing. The coast was all docks and warehouses near this end of the city, and while it might be easier to find hidden nooks to spy on the guys from, it would be a lot harder to blend in.

There was security too, out by the warehouses. Not saps, but company security guys who didn’t blink at the idea of beating loiterers up.

HERE

Neliswa walked with her head low and kept her steps quick, never lingering while also staying at a decent distance from the gang of thugs. They were about as observant as the typical thug, so it really wasn’t much of a challenge.

At least, not until they filed into a warehouse right on the edge of the docks. It stank of fish and diesel and Neliswa had to duck behind cover as one of the guards standing by the building started to turn her way.

She tapped her fingers in a rapid beat against her thigh as she considered what to do next. Going in the front was right out. She didn’t look like one of the thugs, not even one of the very few female ones.

So, that left either going back home and sulking while watching TV, or she could do something stupid. “His ass is going to glow when I’m done with him,” she growled as she got ready to do something stupid.

The warehouse was pressed right up to another similar building, with barely more than a dozen centimetres between their rusting tin walls. The one past the warehouse looked like it was in-use, but another seemed nearly abandoned.

It took a few minutes, but Neliswa went around, sticking to alleys and squeezing between shacks until she was behind the warehouse next to the one where the thugs had gone. There was a door at the back which was locked, at least until she found a length of pipe, jammed it between the door and wall, then pried open a hole just big enough for her head to fit in.

If her head could fit, so could the rest of her, after a bit of squeezing and contorting herself. The interior of this warehouse was entirely unlit, but her eyes adjusted to the darkness soon enough, and there were enough pin-prick holes in the roof to let in a tiny amount of light.

She crept around, found a staircase leading up, then winced with every creak and groan of the metal beneath her feet. Finally, though, she was on the topmost floor of the warehouse. She had noticed something about the building the thugs had entered. It wasn’t as old as some of the other places in this section of the docks, and it had windows on its second floor.

It didn’t take long to find a window in the warehouse she was in that lined up more or less with a window on the warehouse next door. Using the same length of pipe she’d used to pry the door open, she cracked the peeling paint keeping the window sealed, then leveraged it open.

From there, she managed to climb onto the window sill and hang off the side of the warehouse to reach the other’s window. That meant half of her was hanging over a four metre drop into a thin slice of an alleyway, but she had given up on being afraid of mundane things like height a long time ago.

The thug’s warehouse window was, of course, locked. She considered what to do for a long while. The room behind the window was dark, a small office space of some sort that looked like it was collecting dust. There was a thin sliver of light coming from under the door in that room, but she imagined it wasn’t quite as much light as she’d see if the room beyond was well-lit.

So, the office led into a corridor, or another room, which itself led to wherever there was light.

The rhythmic thump of a bass was coming from within, and she caught a scent in the air that she recognized as cannabis. There wasn’t a party going on, she didn’t think. It was too early for that, and not nearly loud enough.

Still...

She couldn’t open the warehouse window from the outside, even if it was newer. The window had a little plastic lock keeping it shut from within.

That lock had to go.

Still with her pipe, she aimed for the corner of the window, then struck with the end of the pipe.

The window clunked, and she pulled back, eyes shut. She opened one eye and stared at the unbroken window. “What?”

She hit it again, harder this time, and it still didn’t break.

Now a little annoyed, she jammed the end of the pipe where it was squished a little into the windowsill and using the sill of the window she was hanging out of, leveraged the window to the side while she hoped that it would crack and break.

Instead of the glass breaking the windowsill did.

“What the hell,” she muttered as the window wobbled in place, detached on one side from the wall it was encased in. The window, it seemed, was tougher than the wall it was placed in. Shaking her head, she shoved the entire window back and slithered across the gap of the alleyway and into the office. The window frame scratched at her back, but it was far less noisy than her original plan.

Once inside the office, she stood, unlocked the window itself, and brought it up, allowing some fresher air into the room and opening up an easy way out for later.

The place needed some fresher air. Cape Town didn’t exactly smell nice at the best of times (too many boats, and the air currents inside the bowl were a little strange), but at least the air wasn’t stale.

Neliswa walked with very careful steps across the room and to the door at the far end. She didn’t want to make the floor creak if she could avoid it.

The music was louder within the warehouse, so she wasn’t too worried, but the last thing she wanted was to get caught. She reached the door without making much noise, then checked the handle to see that it wasn’t locked.

Opening it just a tiny bit, she peeked out into a corridor that didn’t seem any busier than the office she was in.

The music was louder though, and while the corridor wasn’t lit, there was light streaming into it from elsewhere.

She poked her head out and scanned from side to side. Another door was open, and the light seemed to be coming from there.

Leaving the door open just a crack, she tip-toed across to the next room over. It was another office, but this one had a large window against the far wall that overlooked the warehouse’s main floor. One of those windows was broken, allowing sound to spill through. The lights within the warehouse, hanging from the ceiling, were tall enough to splash some light into the space.

She crawled over to the wall, then carefully rose up until just the top of her head was poking above the lip.

There were, at a count, about twenty guys and a few girls below, all of them clearly thugs of one sort or another. Most of them were hanging out in clumps, chatting with beers in hand, or sitting on ripped-up couches and staring at their phones.

A laptop off to one side was plugged into a set of oversized speakers thumping along to some bass-boosted amapiano. No one was dancing along, but the music did seem to fit the environment.

Neliswa searched for her brother, but there was no one like him below, just a lot of morons minding their own business. She worried that she’d just broken into the wrong place, and was considering standing up to leave when a commotion started below.

A few thugs walked in with some urgency, and the mood shifted. People jumped off the couches and a few older guys came in. Some of them were in suits and ties, and she had the impression she was looking at a higher class of criminal than just common street bangers.

One of them was decked out, with two guys standing by his side who were clearly bodyguards of some sort. He looked around the room, then zero’d in on the laptop. “Someone shut that noise off,” he snapped.

Someone ran over to turn the music off and the room went quieter as the speakers shut off. People moved to the sides, and another pair of thugs came in with a large crate between them. They set it down with a heavy thump, then opened it up.

Neliswa watched with mounting confusion as they started pouring sand out of the box onto a tarp in the middle of the floor, then they started placing little statues down in a circle on the sand. She couldn’t tell what the statues were of, or what they were really up to, but the room was relatively quiet except for some shared murmurs.

The air started to shift, twirling about and whipping at clothes and sending the sand spraying across the room. Some of the people below shouted, but the older guys just stayed put.

People started to appear, first one, then two, then finally a third. Ghostly figures who glowed a faint blue and whose feet hovered above the ground without touching it.

Neliswa had an interesting relationship with magic. When she was young and being raised on Disney shows playing on pirated satellite, she wanted magic to be real. Then she grew older and wiser and cast that aside, only for the world to twist around as it so often did and reveal what she’d dismissed to be true. She’d seen the videos of the magical girls and the magical things they fought, and she wasn’t sure what to think of it all.

It was all so, so far away. Like the miracles that happen in the movies, it was a thing for Hollywood and the places she’d never see, not Cape Town.

She supposed this was the world twisting under her one more time.

The ghostly figures collected themselves, turning into sharper, more distinct people.

Pirates.

There was nothing else they could be. The one in the centre was a large, rotund man with a huge beard and crooked teeth set in an evil grin. His clothes were ancient and decrepit, as were the swords hanging by his hips and the musket stuffed down the front of his coat.

The others weren’t better. One even had an eye-patch. They were caricatures of pirates, and she would have dismissed them as a joke if they weren’t also ghostly figures and if the thugs downstairs weren’t taking them so seriously.

“Hello,” the well-dressed thug said.

“We’re not summoned for pleasantries,” the pirate’s leader said. “We’re here for the new crew.”

“And we have them. If you have our end of the bargain?”

The pirate growled, then he gestured to the ghost next to him. That ghost twisted in on himself, then when he rematerialized, it was with a small chest in hand. He passed it to the ghost in charge who opened it and reached in.

Metal clinked, and Neliswa held her breath at the sight of gold.

“Fresh off your own shores. Old Dutch gold,” the man said. He closed the chest and let it drop before him where it landed in the sand with a thump. “Spend it while ye can.”

All three ghosts laughed, and Neliswa fought back shivers.

The leader of the thugs gestured and an underling ran out of the room. There was a pause, which Neliswa used to consider what to do. Call the cops? That... seemed a little mundane. Besides, they wouldn’t do anything.

Neliswa had to hold back a gasp as the underling returned. He had a few thugs with him, and between them, a line of prisoners. Young boys and girls, trudging along with their hands zip-tied together.

She saw her brother, third from the front, sporting a black eye and split lip.

“Good! The pirate haven of Atlantis needs fresh souls,” the pirate captain said.

“No,” Neliswa whispered.

YOU CAN SAVE HIM.

She gasped and spun around, thinking that she’d been made, but the voice hadn’t come from there.

YOU CAN SAVE MANY. FOR EVERY FORCE OF GOOD, THERE MUST BE ONE WHO SHOULDERS THE DUTY OF DOING WHAT MUST BE DONE. THE EVIL WITHIN WHO CASTS UPON THE EVIL WITHOUT.

She looked around some more, but no, she really was alone.

NEITHER OF US ARE SPEECHMAKERS. NOR ARE WE FOLLOWERS.

“Who are you?” Neliswa asked.

I AM MIASMA. YOUR WEAPON, SHOULD YOU CHOSE TO WIELD ME. TOGETHER WE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. TOGETHER, WE CAN CREATE A FUTURE WHERE CRUELTY ONLY LIVES WHERE YOU WILL IT TO.

Neliswa glanced over the wall again. The ghosts grabbed one of the children and pulled. She watched as a ghostly image of the child was ripped out of their body, a body which flopped to the ground, unmoving and unbreathing.

“Look,” she said. “I’m not one for magic and shit, but if it’ll let me save my brother, then yeah, sure, you’ve got me, alright?”

WE HAVE EACH OTHER. SCATTER, MAGICAL GIRL PHANTOM MIST, AND LET LOOSE THE FOG OF WAR.

***

Origin -  One - Screaming Bioplague

Natalie knew more about cancer at fourteen than some doctors did at... whatever age doctors were when they started doctoring.

She’d spent years at the hospital, literally, either in the Children’s General, or more recently the Jewish General’s cancer ward. At some point she’d gotten old enough that someone had decided she could be placed with the adults.

This hospital was all off-white and sterile, with a few bits of chrome here and there as accents.

It was dull, but infinitely better than that fake cheerfulness she’d found in every paediatric hospital so far. Even when she was much younger, there was something so wrong about being surrounded by bright pastels and cheery cartoon animals while knowing full-well that you were going to suffer and die.

Natalie was a bit of a nihilist, a very angry one. At least, that’s what her therapist said. The woman had congratulated her at length about how restrained and in-control she was, despite her thoughts.

It was stupid.

Natalie shook her head and refocused. At the moment she was in Miss Wong’s room. The older lady had colorectal cancer, stage four-A. It meant she had a few bags under the thin hospital blankets, and she was going in and out of surgery as quickly as she could recover between each.

Natalie visited her because she was kind, liked to talk to her as if Natalie was more than just a child to be pitied, and maybe because Miss Wong was also a hardass old bitch. She was widowed and happy about it, gave the nurses hell, and had plenty of stories about her younger days when she got things done through sheer force of will and because she had the personality of a starving lion in a kindergarten.

It was refreshing to Natalie, so she visited when she had the strength to drag herself across the halls while tugging her IV pole along.

Right now, Miss Wong was asleep, breathing even and unbothered, her head resting to the side and one arm holding a magazine that she must have been reading before she fell asleep.

Usually Natalie would have moved on but... something was wrong.

It was probably the glow coming from under the old woman’s blanket. A putrid yellowish light that made her skin crawl just from looking at it.

Carefully, and aware of how wrong it was, Natalie reached over and flipped the covers up to reveal that Miss Wong was wearing the same pattern of hospital gown as her. And under that, her chest was distended and bulging and glowing from within.

“What the fuck,” Natalie muttered. She’d picked up a few choice words from passing head nurses over the years.

The thing under the gown moved, and Natalie let go of the blankets and took a step back, instinct letting her grab onto her IV as she moved. That wasn’t any kind of cancer she knew of, and she knew plenty about them. In fact, she knew enough about biology to be absolutely certain that that wasn’t normal at all.

Miss Wong continued to sleep peacefully, unaware of the thing inhabiting her gut.

Natalie reached over and touched the nurse-call button, then she dragged herself out of the room and into the corridor. There wasn’t anyone around. That in and of itself wasn’t too unusual, but, but something felt off.

Had someone made a mistake and given her the wrong medication? She’d had adverse side effects with some of them. Usually it was pain, or nausea, but once she saw flashing lights in the corners of her eyes.

But no, she saw the pulsing yellow thing. It was real.

Where were the nurses? For that matter, where were the other patients? She started down the corridor leading to her room and paused by one of the windows. There were cars driving by on the streets below, and the sidewalks were about as packed as they normally were. There was a highschool just out of sight and... as cringeworthy as it was to think about, she sometimes imagined herself attending like a normal student. The place seemed as active as normal.

So it was only the hospital that was quieter. She continued, then walked right past her rooms and around a corner. There was a nurse’s station in the middle of the floor, right in front of the elevators.

She stumbled to it.

Sometimes she waited by the station, there were a few benches, and some of the nicer nurses would talk to her when it was quiet. She could wait for her parents to show up. If they did at all.

Today, the nurses appeared dead.

Natalie’s breath hitched and she stumbled forwards a little faster. Nurse Catherine was on the ground, just her head sticking out of the nurse’s station. Behind her were a few others she recognized and... and they were breathing.

Her heart stilled a little, the surge of adrenaline pumping through her calmed for a moment, and she suddenly felt terribly tired. They weren’t dead, just... sleeping on the floor. She stared, then poked nurse Catherine with a foot, which pulled up her sleeve and revealed a tracery of yellow things running up her arm, all of them glowing very faintly.

“What the hell,” Natalie muttered. That wasn’t normal. She felt her skin crawl as she stepped back, then she paused. No, she needed to call for help. Something was very wrong. An attack? It could be some wild terrorist attack or something, like in a movie.

She stepped over nurse Catherine and behind the desk. It felt a little wrong to be on this side of the station, among all the papers and computers and boxes of gloves, but she didn’t have a choice.

Grabbing her IV pole with both hands, she grunted as she lifted it over the nurse then set it back down, then she walked over to one of the phones behind the counter and picked it up. Call for help, get the police over, and everything would be fine.

Of course, there wasn’t a tone on the phone.

She tapped 911 on the keypad anyway, but it didn’t help.

Natalie was out of ideas. Carefully, she looked down at herself, expecting to see yellow stuff crawling across her skin but... no, she was still just a too-thin girl with no breasts, less hair, and skin that was far too pale.

It wasn’t the time for body-image issues. Something was going on. Maybe if she went down to the lobby--

The elevator doors dinged, and on sheer reflex, she dropped to her knees to hide. The IV pole jangled and she froze like a rabbit coming face-to-muzzle with a wolf.

“Why, it seems I’ve outdone myself!” Someone said.

His voice was high-pitched and jolly, as if he was in a great mood. There was something muffling his voice too, like one of those paper masks maybe.

Footsteps sounded across the entrance hall with a strange, tapping beat, as if the person walking was practically skipping along. Natalie held onto her pole harder, until her knuckles went white.

She had to get out of here, call the police or... someone, to help.

Then an upside down face dropped down in front of her and she gasped.

“Well-well!”

Natalie struggled as a hand grabbed her around the upper arm and yanked her out from her hiding spot.

It hurt. The grip was like iron and no one's body was meant to be lifted from one arm like that. “Ow, ow! Let go!” she said.

“Now now, no making demands, little miss.”

She was spun around and she felt a stinging pull around her free arm as the IV tubes were strained. Her pole tipped over, and she screamed as the medical tape strained even more, then it ripped off her. Next came her PICC line, the tube plugged into her arm with a catheter reaching all the way to her heart.

The line ripped out of her like a line of fire and she felt so much pain in a few seconds that she couldn’t even scream. Her vision darkened in the corners, then came back with a burst of light as she was against a wall and pinned there. She kicked out with her slippered feet, but that did nothing. There was a lot of blood flowing down her side.

Then she got a good look at the man holding her in place.

He was tall, way taller than her dad, with a stained and dirtied suit on, and a hood covered the back of his head. The front was a hideous thing. A bird’s face, with a long beak made of mottled flesh with two sunken black eyes and a smattering of warts.

“You’re not supposed to be awake,” he said. His breath washed over her face as she almost gagged. It was rotting meat and refuse, like that one time a nurse had spilled a biobag onto the floor while running.

The monster’s free hand came up and he grabbed her face and thrust it aside. She struggled against it, but he was far too strong and everything was feeling off. Her chest felt full, bloated, and her free arm and legs felt increasingly weak.

The thing sniffed. “Past death’s door anyway. Wouldn’t get a dram of life’s essence from you. Still, curious that you resisted.”

He let go, and she crashed to the ground, her legs flopping without even a hint of the strength she needed to stay up.

Her heartbeat was wrong. It thumped, stopped for a long time, then gave two rapid beats that were out of sync.

She pulled air in like someone drowning who’d just surfaced for the last time. Some small part of her reasoned that if she wasn’t used to suffering, this would be a lot worse than it was.

PICC line disconnected, shoulder dislocated, some bruising and a hard impact to the back. Those were a lot of complications for someone as wrecked as she already was. Oh, she was also bleeding a lot.

Her fledgeling medical knowledge put two and two together, and the prognosis was grim. A voice hammered past those thoughts.

ON THE FIRST TRUE DAY, DURING THE FIRST TRUE BATTLE, DUST BECAME LIFE. LIFE BECAME THOUGHT, AND BOTH PERISHED, LEAVING ONLY THE MEMORY THAT ALL THINGS LIVING MUST DIE.

She was hearing things. She made note of that, right next to the crippling chest pains.

THE BRAVEST OF THEM DIE SCREAMING. ETERNALLY EVOLVING TO FREE THEMSELVES FROM THEIR MORTAL BONDS, THE FLESH GROWS STRONGER. THOSE WHO SCREAM LOUDEST, WHO SPIT IN THE CAPRICIOUS EYES OF FATE, LIVE THE GREATEST OF LIVES.

The voice persisted, and she raised her head. Her vision was a pinprick.

THAT INFECTIOUS CRY IS YOUR POWER. THE REMEMBRANCE OF DEATH AND THE DEFIANCE OF THOSE WITHOUT A CHANCE.

“What?” she muttered, a faint gasp that was still loud in the sterile corridor of her home.

FLESH IS THE MARBLE OF THE DIVINE. SCULPT A PARADISE OF SINEW AND BONE AND BLOOD. I AM MEMENTO MORI, YOUR STAFF, YOUR WEAPON. YOUR CHISEL.

HOWL, AND BECOME THE SCREAMING BIOPLAGUE.

What did she have to lose?

Mustering her strength, ignoring the crushing pain, pulling air through lungs that burned, she kept her eyes open even as her vision went dark, and she screamed.

Her flesh screamed with her.

Her skin bubbled and boiled and twisted. She was swallowed by expanding meat, an egg with a hundred gibbering, howling mouths. Then the egg cracked and she spilled out of its interior with placenta-like ropes still clinging to her.

She was whole.

She felt better than she ever had in her living memory. She was also, she noted, no longer in her hospital gown. Instead she wore a green coat, like a doctor’s, over boots and a short dress which seemed almost hydrophobic from the way the juices dripped off of her.

In her hand was a wand, a piece of twisted green metal with wings on its ends and a fluted staff. The wand spoke to her, in her mind.

GREETINGS, MISTRESS. LET US CURE THE WORLD OF ITS ILLS TOGETHER.

“What in the fuck,” she muttered.

***

Origin - One - Crystal Genocide

Crystal had never been so excited before.

She had also never been so terrified.

Running away from an ambulatory skeleton would do that, she figured. The undead chasing her clacked its teeth together and one long arm clawed out towards her. It was only a last moment duck that allowed her to avoid getting her hair grabbed by bony fingers.

She squeaked and pushed herself to run just a little bit faster. She was pretty good at that.

Crystal always tried to stay fit. And it helped that her family ran a little sheep and alpaca farm just an hour’s drive from Christchurch. There was always something physical to take care of on the farm and that helped her build muscles and grow stronger.

Two things she’d need if she ever became a magical girl.

The skeleton clacked its teeth some more, and she spared a glance over her shoulder to see that it was still following her.

They were a couple of streets away from the stretch of road used up in the weekly farmer’s market. A part of the city she wasn’t entirely familiar with. There were lots of new post-earthquake buildings around right next to some which were way older. She always felt like it made the city look like it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be old or not, but it did lend it a certain charm.

The undead running around weren’t really vibing with the decor though. In fact, she didn’t think they fit in at all.

“Hey, over here!” she shouted as she rounded a corner, her well-worn sneakers scraping across the ground. The skeleton stumbled after her; it wasn’t exactly dextrous, nor were its pals behind it. His buddies behind were catching up too.

Was the skeleton a he? She didn’t know how to tell.

None of them were wearing any clothes, but fortunately, there were no dangly bits on display since those had rotted off a long time ago. That made it kind of hard to tell if they were boy or girl skeletons.

Crystal supposed it didn’t matter. They could be whatever they wanted to be as long as they stopped trying to eat people. Or maybe they were just trying to kill people? She wasn’t really sure.

Really, the moment she saw real living (well, not living) undead she acted. First, she bonked one on the skull with a change jar, then she grabbed a folding chair and flung it at another. Then the skeletons had started chasing her. Some of them, at least.

It was all very exciting, and she was pretty happy with herself.

Crystal knew that she wasn’t very clever. Or smart. Or any of the other words that meant about the same thing. She’d repeated a year in elementary school because of it, and she had a hard time making friends because when she got excited about something, she really got excited about it.

That was alright. She had a nice family, she had an okay life, and while her dreams were mostly impractical, they didn’t hurt anyone to chase.

She wanted to be a magical girl.

It had started when she was young, watching bootleg, pirated shows from Japan, then a year and a bit ago the first real magical girl (presumably, there were all sorts of reports out now, and a bunch of fakes too, she followed all the stories) showed up.

A lot of people doubted at first, but Crystal wasn’t one of them.

When images of Magical Girl Gravity’s Heartbeat (so cute!) surfaced, Crystal believed them, even if everyone else said they were faked. And when videos of Magical Girl Burning Ultranova (so cool!) surfaced, with the redheaded girl planting a foot on top of an ancient nazi warmech, people said it was a joke.

Crystal followed all of their stories. From Hypertense Breakpoint’s destruction of an alien fleet over Egypt to Feasting Carnage’s dire warnings on TV about the fae.

The world might have been shaken by the reveal that magic was real, but to Crystal it was all fantastic good news.

So she determined to become a magical girl. Which meant, of course, saving people and being as good a girl as she could be.

Unfortunately, there weren’t any nazis to punch or murderous mimes to combat in New Zealand. Not that she knew, at least. Not until today, that was.

“Come on, come on!” she called back.

The skeletons ran after her, and Crystal zipped out of the other side of the alley, then paused to wave her hand over her head. There was a police car racing down the street. She practically stepped up in front of it when the driver jerked the car to the side and zoomed right on past, siren blaring.

“Hey!” she screamed after them. She’d almost lost her knees to the car’s yellow-blue bumper.

A skeleton jumping out at her reminded Crystal that standing still was a foolish idea, so she took off running again.

Now, what was a wannabe magical girl supposed to do about a small bunch of angry undead chasing her around?

If she was a proper magical girl, like the others on the news, she’d whip out her super special weapon, then do some incredible magic at the undead until they were nothing but dust! Unfortunately, she didn’t have that, so she kept running.

Why, she wondered, was there nothing along the streets that was convenient and weapon-like that someone could grab in a hurry? A nice rack of umbrellas or even a pile of loose stones? That would have made her life easy.

She spun around a corner and found the police car reversing down the street in a hurry while being chased by a skeleton riding... was that an alpaca skeleton?

She didn’t stop to stare--for long--and instead kept on sprinting until, about half a block later, she developed a stitch just under her ribs. Crystal groaned and pressed a hand against her side. “Why now?” she moaned.

Glancing around, she made note of the skeletons (still following) and her surroundings. She was... right in front of her favourite place. The shop was fairly new, opened by a fellow weeb and magical girl enthusiast and it sold all sorts of over-priced merch.

She ran into the store. Not because she wanted to bring in the skeletons (it was her favourite place, and she had planned on stopping by to gawk once the market was over) but because she knew what they sold.

“Perfect!” Crystal said as she ran to a display on the far wall. It had replicas of some of the magical girl’s weapons. Rending Nightmare’s awesome rapier, Happy Sparkle’s chainsword (with revving noise action!) and, right there in pride of place, Feasting Carnage's massive fork. She grabbed the Prongs replica, then charged out of the shop while the guy behind the counter called out for her to stop.

She was barely out of the store when she encountered the first skeleton following her.

“Devour!” she shouted as she plunged the fork forwards.

The skeleton smacked it aside, and the top half went flying.

She stared at where the plastic broke off and was suddenly very glad she didn’t waste a month’s allowance on the replica.

“Hey, what are you, oh shit!” the store’s clerk said as he ran out, then right back in. The door shut with a jingle and clang and Crystal was left on the street with nothing but half of a giant novelty fork and less of a clue as to what to do next.

Then the skeleton grabbed her arm and she screamed and tried to pull back, but it was impossibly strong for something with no muscles left.

“No, let go!” she said as she smacked the skeleton’s skull repeatedly with the bottom end of the fake Prongs.

This was it, she was going to die.

IN THE FIRST AGE--

“Holy shit!” Crystal screamed. “Are you a voice in my head?”

... IN THE FIRST AGE, DURING--

“Am I a magical girl?” Crystal asked, tears springing to her eyes. They were only partially because she was being dragged across the pavement by what was now a pair of skeletons. One had grabbed her ankles when she tried to kick it.

... YES. I AM SCINTILLATING DISHARMONY, AND I--

“Pretty name, but can you appear because I could really use some magicking right now!” she screamed.

There was a long, drawn out sigh that wasn’t hers in her mind.

Then Crystal felt something cool in her hand and when she glanced down, she realized she was holding a sword. It was long and narrow, with a blade made of a glass-like, crystalline material and with a hilt of twisting gold.

“Whoa,” she muttered. Then she snapped out of it, raised the sword, and inexpertly hacked at the skeletons.

As resistant as they were to her smacks and punches, they broke apart and splintered into pieces with every blunt strike of the sword.

“Yeah!” Crystal said as she jumped back to her feet, sword raised above her in a big cheer. “We’re awesome! You’re awesome.” She hugged the sword and spun around with it. “This day is awesome! Even with the undead!”

More skeletons were approaching, and she faced them with a smile.

“Hey, Scintillating... uh...”

SCINTILLATING DISHARMONY.

“Yeah! What’s my magical girl name?”

YOU ARE CRYSTAL GENOCIDE, THE LAST.

“Oh, that’s my normal name! That’ll be easy to remember.”

YES, I IMAGINE THAT’S THE POINT.

“So, how do I transform?” she asked.

A MAGICAL GIRL TRANSFORMS AS SHE WILLS IT.

That was simple enough. Crystal let her eyes go half-lidded and she focused really, really hard. She made a loud grunting noise and felt the blood rushing up to her head and her face warming up.

She was worried she’d either wet herself or give herself a stroke. It wasn’t working.

So, time to try something else.

“Come on, Scintillating Destruction, let’s do this!” she shouted. She swung the sword across herself in a long slash and... and she transformed.

The sun’s light glinted off the tip of the blade then split apart. Two beams of light made solid wrapped themselves around her form and she felt her clothes disappearing a split second before the entire street lit up with brilliant, rainbow-hued beams of glittering light.

Crystal stumbled backwards, caught herself with a spin, then wavered a bit as a skirt swayed around her knees.

She looked down at herself, then up to the side where she could see her reflection in the glass of her favourite store, with cardboard cutouts of other magical girls just behind the window.

Her costume was a big, poofy dress, with a wildly impractical bow at the small of her back and poofed sleeves. It was covered in little lacy details and a few sparkling gems.

“I am never getting changed, ever,” Crystal said.

YOU CAN OBSERVE YOURSELF LATER. THERE ARE ENEMIES TO BE ELIMINATED. CLEANSE THE WORLD TO CRYSTAL CLARITY!

“Wow, I’m pretty dense, but even I know that that wasn’t the best choice of words there,” Crystal said.

JUST KILL THE UNDEAD.

“Okay!” Crystal said with a cheer.

She ran at the undead who were shambling towards her and met the first with a swing of her sword which sent its head crashing through the second floor window of a nearby home. Someone screamed from in there and Crystal winced.

But it was okay. She’d figure this magical girl thing out, and then she’d make all sorts of friends and be the best magical girl there ever was!

***