The town of Sekiu was dead.

It was more of a village than a town, really. The kind of place that lived on tourist traffic and hosted more RVs than houses. People who lived inland drove out to Sekiu for fishing, diving, and kayaking. Officially, it was a “census-designated place.” Its permanent residents had numbered in the low double digits. Then Echidna came along.

Messages left by the dead described an atmosphere of terror. Coordinated attacks on power lines, phone lines, and other pieces of communication infrastructure ensured that all contact with the outside world was cut off before anyone in town knew what was happening. Neighbors went missing. Anyone who tried to escape ran afoul of the monsters stalking the woods and lurking beneath the waves. The nightmare lasted for three nights. By the time anyone outside Sekiu noticed its issues and bothered to check up, every human soul had been taken by the Queen of Beasts.

Sloppy, Striga noted as she executed a writhing mass of human faces and grasping limbs. Her spear cut through transmuted flesh and gave mercy to the Catastrophe’s latest victims. Vanguard should have been alerted the moment contact was broken. We could have dealt a serious blow to Echidna’s stockpile with the right timing, not to mention the lives we could have saved.

Echidna had left one beast behind as a sign of Vanguard’s failure to protect the people of Sekiu. It could be interpreted as a challenge aimed at Striga, but more likely it was a message for the various news organizations that would soon descend on the dead village: Striga failed. Vanguard failed. Your heroes can’t protect you.

Anyone who thought the Catastrophes to be mindless avatars of ruin were fools; the champions of Jupiter were well-versed in engineering propaganda. Photographs of Sekiu’s corpse would become ammunition for Vanguard’s various opponents. All as the Jovians planned, no doubt.

Perhaps, if she exerted her influence in the right places, Striga could use this disaster to implement stricter policies within the various organizations that Vanguard relied upon to notify them of potential witch activity. But that would cost precious time and resources, which might be why Echidna had committed this atrocity in the first place. In an attrition game, the Jovians would always hold the advantage.

Still, the aggression was unexpected. Athena’s model of Echidna required tuning. Yet another task to add to the list.

“Excellent work as always, Ms. Lane,” said a white cat with tufts of pink fur along its chest, ears, and paws. It wore a collar of stone, and it stared up at Striga with gold-pupiled, silver-irised eyes.

Rhea, emissary of the solar faction of Jovians. “Our premier talent scout,” it had once introduced itself. A liar like all the rest, pretending itself invested in a meaningless war. Striga’s spear flashed and she cut the cat in two. That, too, was meaningless. The sundered halves of the projection melted into light and reformed.

The dark spirit looked unaffected, though its ear flicked in annoyance. “Violent and rude,” the not-a-cat chided. “You should have been a witch.”

“Slave to Jupiter,” Striga greeted her opponent. “Why do you sully my eyes and ears?”

Rhea sighed dramatically. “As I’ve told you many times, Ms. Lane, I have no idea what this ‘slave to Jupiter’ business is about. The planet Jupiter is gone, remember? And I certainly haven’t seen any evidence to support your silly ‘egregore’ hypothesis. Must you insist on being so hostile to your benefactors while our mutual enemies—the sidereals and their witches—plot and scheme in the shadows?”

Striga’s hostility to the Jovians had been exposed years ago as part of a ploy to gather more information on their designs and capabilities. She had proven to her own satisfaction that the Jovians were incapable of rescinding a power they had granted, and that their understanding of their own pawns was far from complete. They made mistakes. That meant they could be beaten.

“What do you want, Rhea?” Striga asked calmly. The body of the fleshy gestalt was still deflating beside her, its vital fluids seeping into the earth. “I think we’re long past games. Speak plainly or be ignored, as I have other matters to attend this evening.”

The cat watched Striga silently with those bright silver eyes. “Of course,” it said after a moment. “I wouldn’t want to make you late for your rendezvous with that adorable roommate of yours. What was her name again? Rachel… Emily, right?”

Sophia was too practiced at the great game to show her real emotions. Her hands did not stiffen, her shoulders did not hunch, and her expression did not shift to reveal anger or fear. The mask she had so carefully cultivated was that of an icy maiden, a cold-hearted heroine who would always do whatever was necessary to achieve her goals. She would pursue the salvation of humanity without any weakness of sentiment. That was what she pretended to be.

The mask of ice—the mask of Striga—hid the panic in her heart and the hatred in her veins. “I believe I just told you that I have no interest in games, Rhea. Yes, her name is Rachel, as you have surely known for years without ever bringing her up. That you do so now suggests your understanding of her has changed. Something has led you to think you can use her against me, yes? What harm to me are you threatening, cat?”

Striga was very familiar with the Jovians confronting her over Rachel, but never in the true timeline. The Jovians had only ever acted against her precious roommate in timelines where Sophia’s actions revealed the depth of her feelings for Rachel. Sophia’s heart was armored, invisible to the perceptions of the Jovians. So long as she never said the words out loud, she could love Rachel from afar. So long as she never told Rachel how she felt, they could stay living together. The Jovians could not be allowed to know that Rachel was her sole vulnerability. Her reason to keep fighting.

Where had she gone wrong? Was her plea for a date night too transparent? She had constructed her wording to maintain plausible deniability in the eyes of both Rachel and the Jovians, but those were two of her biggest blind spots; Rachel by choice, the Jovians by the design of their mantles. Striga had hammered Athena to her purposes and constructed a model of the Jovians through indirect analysis, but it was incomplete and imperfect. Had they seen through her? Did they know?

The entirety of Striga’s chain of speculation was processed and set aside in the scant instants between her speech and Rhea’s response. Possibilities were assembled and prepared for. Athena whirred in the back of Striga’s mind, eager for the challenge.

Rhea said, “We would never seek to harm or inconvenience our bravest of knights. You are the heroine of the world, Ms. Lane, and we are truly grateful to you for your many services against the servants of the nefarious sidereals.”

The cat was laying it on thick. Striga speculated that dark spirits like Rhea yearned to express their hungers, trapped within the mask of the helpful mascot animal. In a sense, Rhea’s fencing with Striga—though constrained by an insistence on maintaining the lie—was a chance for it to show more of its true personality through heavy sarcasm.

“In that spirit,” Rhea continued, “we offer you a gift. And what better gift for Lady Athena than the gift of knowledge?”

The tension spiked in Striga’s calculating mind. She knew exactly what knowledge the emissary meant to impart. There was no way to evade hearing it without making the Jovians more suspicious—more convinced of their assumptions. Striga would always choose knowledge, even puzzled from lies, no matter the harm it potentially represented.

The mask of ice said, “Tell me.”

“Rachel Emily is in love with you.”

Striga blinked slowly. She tilted her head. And then she laughed. “That’s your big revelation? Oh, please. I’ve known that for years, you pest. What, has it taken you this long to figure that out?”

Play it off. Don’t let them think that this is a knife. You don’t care that the Jovians know how she feels about you, because you don’t feel the same way. You don’t care about Rachel like she cares about you. She’s just a pleasant distraction. You are the mask of ice.

“That girl is incapable of hiding how she feels. It’s kind of cute, really. A bit of normalcy in my very abnormal life. Yes, of course I knew.”

“It did indeed seem impossible,” the cat purred, “that one of your fine perception would miss such an obvious crush. Therefore, we had always assumed you kept the girl at arm’s length to avoid feeding that crush… without breaking her heart in the process. The maintenance of a desirable entente, as it were. But then you invited her out on a date. How interesting.”

Going to the aquarium together is not a date, she almost lied. Arguing the matter was pointless. The more effort she spent to convince the cat, the more obvious her feelings would be. A different tactic was required.

Striga sighed. “I don’t have time for this, Rhea. Not your accusations, not your games, and not your lies about who you serve. Let’s lay all our cards on the table and discuss this like adults. You think you’ve found a chink in my armor—an attachment I haven’t severed—which you can threaten with words and witches until you force some kind of concession about my activities against your agenda. An agenda which, I am fully aware, would result in the most dangerous and destructive of the egregores claiming the throne of the King in Yellow.”

Rhea’s tail flicked. “We do not pay attention to the idle fantasies of horror writers and their fans. We simply hold concern for your well-being, Ms. Lane. It would be terrible if you were to experience the loss of someone close to you. Who knows what you might do to prevent such an outcome? Perhaps, in the face of such looming tragedy, knowing it could still be prevented, you might be more willing to listen to our long-ignored guidance.”

Striga smiled without warmth. “You’re wrong about that. I find Rachel to be charming, entertaining, and a breath of fresh air in my busy life, but if you put her in danger, I’ll let her die. I won’t pay ransom or negotiate my ideals for the sake of some… pleasant distraction. And if you think hurting someone I care about—anyone I care about, no matter how deep or how shallow—will throw me off my game enough that you can try to sneak a victory past my sight, then you must have forgotten what happened in Seattle. Perhaps you should ask Phage why she doesn’t come to my state anymore.”

The cat’s tail flicked again. “Is that your final answer, Ms. Lane?”

“Put a gun to her head,” she said coldly. “See if I flinch.”

Silently, Rhea tilted its head. Then, without another word, it walked away and vanished.

Striga did not slump. She did not sigh. The Jovians were always watching. The mask of ice could never leave Striga’s face.

She replayed the conversation in her head, searching for mistakes. She reconstructed Rhea’s participation and fed it to Athena in a manner the mantle could process. She tried not to panic about Rachel’s safety.

In that exchange, Striga had committed the grave sin of weakness: she had chosen the path more likely to protect Rachel over the path more likely to harm the plots of her enemies. The true path to victory, Athena insisted, would have been leaning into the assumptions of the Jovians and allowing them to think they had won something. If they had believed that Striga’s feelings for Rachel were intense enough to restrict her behavior, they would have extracted concessions. They would have constructed their plans around being able to control Striga’s movements and decisions.

And then, at the critical moment, Striga would have broken her word and ruined their plans. With the right timing, there was almost no limit to how much she could have disrupted the Jovians’ endgame. All it would have cost was Rachel.

They’d kill her, of course, if that path was chosen. They would have to, to avoid showing weakness, even if they believed that Striga had lied to them about her feelings. Maybe Striga could have saved Rachel in that timeline. But she doubted it.

Not when she’d failed so, so many times before.

This was the path that posed the least risk to Rachel’s life. If Striga had played her part right, the Jovians would be reconsidering their approach. They were too careful to act without as close to perfect information as they could get. But there was always a chance that she’d gotten something wrong. Athena was not infallible, and neither was Striga.

She finished her survey of the village and flew back to Vanguard’s fortress in the Olympic Mountains, scheming all the while. The Citadel welcomed her.

In her office, Striga updated her map of Echidna’s movements. The holographic projection lit up a blank white wall in perfect color. The Queen of Beasts had been busy all across the Pacific Northwest, but her activities were concentrated in the state of Washington. When all the new pins were entered, Striga clasped her hands behind her back and paced.

A knock on the door was swiftly answered. Herbalist stepped into the room, closing the door securely behind her, and came to stand by Striga’s desk. Her eyes flitted to the map and narrowed. “There’s been another?”

“Sekiu,” Striga answered. “Echidna was thorough. There were no survivors, but documents on-site suggest the abductions took place over three days. She cut communications and penned them in, then picked them apart. Public relations will have to be handled carefully; this was an attack on our image. I’ll schedule an appearance for myself later, but I want softer faces on the scene now. When the reporters swarm that dead town, I want them to see grief, horror, and conviction on the faces of Vanguard’s first responders. Send in Blue Team.”

That meant Harmony, Bulwark, Thunderclap, and Invicta. A team carefully constructed to guarantee certain personality conflicts that would drive its members to improve without creating such wedges between them that they failed to trust each other in moments of need. Striga had been cultivating their team for some time, both as a unit under her command and in the eyes of the media. They were bait.

“Harmony will take point in an official capacity, but Thunderclap is who we want in front of the ambush reporters. We’ve trained them to expect that she’ll be an easy mark, so it shouldn’t require a push. Thunderclap’s raw emotional responses should sell how seriously we’re taking this matter while Harmony sculpts the narrative with her formal training.”

“Should Invicta be assigned elsewhere?”

Striga shook her head. “No. Mars won’t spend her on a game of public opinion. Sending us a champion bearing his Greek counterpart was a taunt, not a serious attempt at infiltration. He knows he’s only getting one use out of Invicta before we get rid of her.” Striga paused, then added, “Besides, I haven’t given up on turning her yet. Granting her a leadership position she wasn’t prepared for has done wonders for her personality and her connection to Blue Team.”

Herbalist nodded. “Then, is there anything else you’d like me to take care of before you retire for the evening?” Herbalist had been briefed days ago that this evening would be a private one, strict enforcement, and she hadn’t questioned the order.

“Yes. Send a message to Firewatch. Have her lean on her Coterie connections and spend any favors necessary to secure the support of Minotaur and her people before the organization holds their next vote on the matter of Echidna.”

Firewatch was one of Striga’s captains, tasked with managing operations in Oregon. Herbalist was the captain for Washington, and the last was Legionary in Canada.

“The other two will be trickier,” Striga admitted, contemplating the Coterie’s leadership. “I considered sending Legionary to make trouble for Sister Nature, but I don’t believe that will be necessary. If Lilith, Minotaur, and Harlequin are all in favor of action, the Coterie will comply with their wishes. To do otherwise would invite a schism in their ranks.”

“Which our enemies might want,” Herbalist pointed out. Striga knew that, of course, but part of Herbalist’s role as her closest advisor was to voice the obvious. Sometimes a mind running too fast can outthink itself.

Striga smiled. “Yes, let’s hope they strive for such an outcome. The time has come to clean house. All loyalties must be ascertained.” The hint of emotion fell from her face as quickly as it had appeared. “Even setting aside Echidna, we cannot afford to cut corners with Jupiter’s new seal. Lilith’s cooperation must be secured. The fact of her character is that she answers to a single lever. I expect Venus has been making promises to her for some time, but they remain only promises. We’re going to give Lilith one of the things she’s been pushing for since she helped found the Coterie.”

Herbalist raised an eyebrow. “In the current climate, that will consume a great deal of our accumulated political capital.” Bribes. Blackmail. Debts. Everything the Vanguard could get their hands on.

Striga sighed. “I know. I had other plans for those resources, but that can come after we save the world. If we’re going to induct Lilith into the conspiracy, we need her as biased toward us as possible. See it done.”

With a polite bow, Herbalist swept from the room and left Striga to her thoughts. Outside, the sun was beginning to set.

In the heart of her fortress, in the most defended room in the Citadel, hidden behind layers and layers of wards, Sophia Lane allowed herself a small smile. The burdens of the world still weighed upon her shoulders, but just for one night, just for a few hours, she was going to set that all aside.

I’m coming, Rachel. Let’s have a wonderful date.

[commentary]

idk who this striga character is but she seems to be taking precious screentime away from mordacity, champion of the people

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 11th of January.

[/commentary]

My oldest friend in the world—a woman I’ve known since high school—just told me that she’s a wizard. This is, to put it mildly, something of a shock. And, given my best friend’s propensity for shameless lies and pursuing the bit at all costs, I’m not sure I believe her.

I shoot Mordacity a skeptical look and say, “Okay, prove it. What makes you a ‘wizard’ and not a witch or a magical girl? How do I know you’re not just messing with me?”

She taps her chin and muses, “If you think about it, we can only really know our own experiences, and even those can be manipulated. Is knowledge even attainable?”

I conjure a Pearl Princess figurine and throw it at her. “Killing you with hammers. Answer the goddamn question.”

Mordacity bats away the toy and snickers. “Alright, alright. But you asked for it.” She meets my gaze, grins, and says, “On Halloween, you went into the World of Glass with Howl, Harlequin, Ferromancer, Agatha, and Delilah, and in that other world you met Venus, Mars, and Hastur. The civilian names of Agatha and Bombshell are Eleanor and Hannah. Ferromancer is Erica. Howl is Gretchen, though you probably shouldn’t tell her you know that. Strix Striga, the champion of Minerva, is also Sophia Lane, the girl you’ve been madly in love with since she stopped you from killing yourself.”

I tense. I’d always suspected that Mordacity knew more of my interest in Sophia and Striga than she let on, but to know so much—to know everything—and spell it out so bluntly? “How do you know that?” I demand.

“And,” Mordacity continues without acknowledging me, “nearly every night, you dream of a city of bleached white stone, a bleeding sun, and a deep, dark pit. But something was different about your dream last night, wasn’t it? You saw something new.”

“What? What do you—” I’m interrupted by a sudden headache. It’s a bolt of pain exactly like I felt when Amaranth first mentioned the dream of the pit to me. It’s the sting of remembering something I wasn’t supposed to.

The city. The sun. The pit. But flying overhead, silhouette just barely visible as it crossed in front of the bleeding sun, was a black-feathered bird. A raven. I know it was a raven with absolute and inexplicable certainty.

A raven that laughed like Mordacity laughs now, croaking and cawing as she twirls her raven-headed staff. Her eyes shine with impish glee. “Did you think it was Jupiter sending those dreams? Did you think it was the Yapper in Yellow? Nah. It was me, A. I wove the dream that woke so many of your peers to the existence of the World in Glass, forging a connection that the clever among you have used to gain sight beyond sight. But no one sees as much as me.” Her grin widens. “I know the secrets of every dreamer. Even a mind as disciplined as Striga’s can’t maintain its defenses within the chaos of a dream.”

My hackles raise, but I hesitate, paralyzed by the enormity of what I’ve just learned. Mordacity sent the dreams. Mordacity knows everything that the dreamers know—that Striga knows, that Howl knows, that the Morrigan knows. She’s playing a game that none of us even knew was on the table. “How is that even possible?” I ask. “If the Jovians could do something like that—”

“But they can’t,” she cuts me off. “Neither can the egregores. They all lack the imagination to cast a spell not given to them by the Fucker in Flax. That should be of interest to you, given they’re all standing in the way of your peaceful life with Sophia. A weapon they can’t use is exactly what you need to beat them. I like your plan, by the way. Turning yourself into bait for Venus? Hilarious. Of course, once her hooks are in you and the connection is established, you do need a way to take advantage of that. You might enjoy Striga putting her spear in you, but it’ll be a fairly short-lived pleasure.”

I flinch. I haven’t told anyone about that, haven’t said a word of it out loud, haven’t written it down. “Fuck, you really can read minds. That’s terrifying, M.”

Of all my friends, Mordacity has always been the one who knew me best. I always had the sense that she knew more than she was letting on about my feelings for Sophia and Striga, even though there was no way she could have known what I knew. Except, she did know. She’s known everything, all along.

This is inarguably a gross violation of privacy. I should probably feel a sense of betrayal, but all I feel is exasperated. Maybe I’ve just known her too long. If any of my other friends came to me with this reveal, I’d act differently, but it’s Mordacity; of course she’d do this.

Mordacity laughs and steps back onto the roof railing, then hops off so she’s back at eye level with me. “Thanks. Now let’s have the rest of this conversation somewhere brighter.”

“Wait, what?”

Mordacity extinguishes the fireball she was holding, then lunges forward and grabs my hand. I blink and we’re not in Forks.

Daylight pours through the gaps in clouds over great edifices of concrete, glass, and steel. Advertisements play over every surface in paper, paint, and electronic screens. It’s almost like the most urban parts of downtown Forks, but there’s one key difference: everything is in a language that I can’t read but find extremely familiar. People bustle past on a busy street, no one seeming to notice how we’ve emerged out of thin air. And almost everyone I see is—

“Welcome to glorious Nippon,” Mordacity says with an exaggerated bow, holding onto her hat. Straightening up, she adds, “Specifically, we’re in Akihabara, which is part of Tokyo.”

I shake off my disorientation and the questions come tumbling out. “Are you insane? Did you just teleport us to Japan? Why? How? What about all the people who just saw us appear? And again, how the hell did you—”

“I’m a wizard that’s sick with it,” Mordacity cackles. “Goated, with the sauce. Anyway, don’t worry about the civvies; I’m very, very good at manipulating the veil. No one will notice anything wrong even if I walk up to someone and summon a fireball in their face. Now c’mon, we’ve got places to be!”

She tugs on my arm and drags me down the street, ignoring my protests, until stopping outside a building that has me recoiling in fascination and horror. It’s a white and pink monstrosity, its facade sculpted to resemble ribbons. A poster next to it has the English words “Welcome home!” above a picture of a Japanese girl in a frilly maid uniform.

Mordacity pulls me inside. “Behold! Akihabara’s top-rated maid cafe. Perfect for a pair of loser weebs.”

“Oh, I hate you. I hate you so much. You’ve been here before, haven’t you?” I accuse.

She turns to the maid girl approaching us and starts talking in rapid-fire Japanese. I didn’t even know she could speak Japanese beyond honorifics and meme words.

We’re swiftly seated and given menus. Luckily, they’re in both English and Japanese. In a fugue state, goaded on by Mordacity, I order omurice and a caramel latte. She gets herself two slices of cake and a soda. It’s four in the afternoon here, but my internal clock is running on Washington time. Why am I eating a rice omelette at midnight?

The maid cafe experience is so disorienting that it actually manages to distract me from Mordacity being a wizard for a few minutes. I’m used to customer service voice from food workers, but this is a whole new level. It’s not just a bit of politeness, there’s deference here. The maids call everyone by titles and say and do everything with an unsettling degree of obsequiousness. They play it up as cute, and maybe that would’ve worked on me if I was five years younger—hell, if I was one year younger; it’s not like I had a lot of dignity before I took Pandora’s deal—but now it just makes me uncomfortable. The clientele in this cafe are mostly guys sitting alone, their ages varying from the teens to a few men in their late forties. The way some of them look at the exclusively youthful employees makes my skin crawl.

It’s the same thing we’re selling in Visage, isn’t it? Just a different flavor. Sassy instead of subservient, but we still exist to be consumed.

Mordacity chuckles at my discomfort, watching me watch the maids and guests. “Not really like the version that exists in your head from watching anime, is it? The desperation’s a little too palpable. That’s why I like it, actually; that sharp tang of disappointment when you realize the difference between fantasy and reality. You could call the people who come here pathetic, or you could call them lonely. Are they the victims of a workaholic society, or are they failures to adapt that take it out on others? And what about the girls who fill those uniforms? Are they victims, or just savvy operators getting that bread through any means necessary?”

I roll my eyes at her speech; I’ve heard it before in a dozen variations. “Yeah, yeah. Can we skip to the part where you actually explain what’s going on? I’ve got a billion questions, M. How did you become a wizard? What does it mean to be a wizard? What do you know about the egregores?” I hesitate. “And… do you know how I can kill a god?”

Mordacity daintily picks at her cake, which is very funny to watch when I’m used to her devouring everything put in front of her like a starving ghoul. “I can answer two of those questions at once: a wizard is someone who learned magic the hard way. While your kind bargained for mantles and the egregores were born into their powers, I studied to be able to cast spells. You lot are running on automatic; all of my magic is manual control.”

For a moment, I draw a surreal parallel between this encounter and my first lunch with Ferromancer. Two conversations about magic in two public eateries, just with very different histories and atmospheres. “What about Hastur?” I wonder aloud. “I guess she’d be in the wizard camp—the manual users?”

Something cold seeps into Mordacity’s smile. Her eyes turn flinty. “Yes, that’s one way to describe the Leech in Lemon. Listen, A, I know you have a lot of questions, but… can I take a moment to monologue? I’ve got some groundwork I want to lay, so I’d appreciate your patience.”

I squint at her. Sincerity and Mordacity are mortal enemies, but she seems earnest right now. This is clearly important to her. “Fine. Go on.”

She drums her fingers on the table. “You’ve been to the twin of our reality, a dimension shaped by the emotions and beliefs of willful, imaginative minds. The Suzerain in Saffron calls that place the World of Glass, but I have a better name for it: Pandemonium, the realm of chaos from which all demons are born. And chaos is the key. Manipulating chaos—applying order, structure, a pattern—is the essence of magic—and everyone is constantly doing it. Our myths, our stories, our conspiracies, all of it influences Pandemonium—just not very strongly. It takes thousands of minds dreaming in concert to make anything of significance happen over there. Seven billion of us couldn’t bring the World of Glass closer—couldn’t grasp Pandemonium and bring its magic across the barrier between dimensions—no matter how hard we wished. Humans have dreamed about magic for the entire history of our species. How many times have we tried to claim it through some ritual or another? How many attempts at sorcery, at divination, at calling forth entities from beyond? All for nothing. And then one demiurge did the job in a single evening. She sauntered over, planted herself down, and remade the whole world. Like it was easy. Like it was natural for her. Like her perspective mattered more to that realm than the collective desires of all humanity.”

I’ve known Mordacity for a long time. When she’s just a little angry, she’ll snap and bite like the rest of us. But when she’s well and truly furious, she goes cold. She might still be smiling, but this is the angriest I’ve ever seen her. She hates Hastur.

“How did you learn magic?” I ask softly. “How did you come to understand the World of Glass?”

Mordacity relaxes and pushes her plates to one side, both thoroughly cleaned of cake. She reaches into the air and pulls a book out of nothing, then slams it down on the table in front of her. The book is dark green, its pages slightly yellowed.

Its cover calls it the Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred.

I stare at my best friend and contemplate stabbing her. “Listen, M. I don’t think I want to leave you on top of a mountain anymore, not now that I know you can teleport. Instead, I want to throw you into the mountain and drop an avalanche on your head. How are you still fucking with me? How many bits did you prepare for this stupid conversation?”

Mordacity cackles and pulls off the cover, revealing it as a custom-printed dust jacket over a much more sensible-looking leatherbound grimoire. “C’mon, A, you know I live for the bit. Besides, the book didn’t come with a name, so I had to name it myself. I think I did a good job.”

I groan. “You’re going to pull that thing open and the inside is going to be like, a transcript of Homestuck that you had someone bind and artificially weather. You goblin.”

“Fuck, that would’ve been an awesome bit. Alas, this is a genuine tome of forbidden arcane knowledge.” She flips the book open.

The pages of the tome are written in English, or maybe just a sequence of Latin letters that vaguely resemble the shape and patterns of English. Between blocks of text are strange symbols that seem to writhe and twist on the page. The letters writhe with them and shift into different patterns—more recognizable patterns—that call to me—that I know I could understand if I just looked at in the right way, just kept peering deeper into the page, deeper into the spiral of ink to the heart of their secrets hidden just beyond reach, if I could only—

Mordacity snaps the tome shut and my mind returns to me, harrowed by my brush with a font of arcane madness. “Real spellbook, one of only a handful in existence. Very dangerous. I like to think of it as more of a libram than a grimoire. I managed to get my hands on it years ago and it has taken years to master even a handful of its secrets. Pain to study, but the ability to reshape reality with my will and imagination has been well worth the blood and bile.”

My head is still dizzy from staring into the libram. Is that even a real word? I’m going to look that up later and find out she pranked me with another nerd term, aren’t I? My best friend has a tome of eldritch knowledge and she’s using it to fuck with me, because that’s who she is. I shake my head to clear it and try to focus on what matters. “How can I do what you do?” I ask. “Teleporting, weaving dreams, actively veiling, that’s all high-level magic—the kind of magic that would be good to have if I’m going to tangle with the top dogs of the World of Glass. How can I learn to cast spells like you do? Can you help me find a spellbook of my own?”

“You don’t have the time for it,” Mordacity says bluntly. “It took me years, A. You’ve got less than one before it all goes down. What you can do is keep stretching the limits of your mantle. I can help with that. Once you understand what a mantle really is and how it works, you’ll have an easier time altering its nature.”

I grumble and sip my latte. “What’s a mantle, then?”

“A set of training wheels. A black box. A machine that translates simple intent into something more complicated. A mantle is a conceptual structure that shapes order from chaos. The kind of magic that I do—that the Bitch in Brass does—we have to impose that order by hand. When I cast a spell, I reach into the chaos of Pandemonium and manipulate it directly. I have to dictate every detail of what the spell is meant to do. A mantle does that for you. There are certain spells etched into each, patterns woven into the whole. Mars and Venus scavenged the mantles—pieced them together from whatever patterns they could get their hands on. They’re crude in design, but effective. The conceptual space around the mythological figure of Prometheus has enough weight to stitch together certain patterns of transformation and creation that form the basis of your spells as a witch.”

I hum to myself. “So, one magical girl being able to throw fire while another summons ice, those are, what, the patterns written into their mantle? Why can someone like Amaranth only move fast while Herbalist and Lilith get all kinds of ritual effects?”

“Not all mantles are created equal,” Mordacity says with a smirk. “You know about the Catastrophes. The difference between your mantle and a D-lister’s mantle is that you got a computer and she got scrap metal. Mantles like yours and Ferromancer’s started out more complex, capable of holding more patterns, while the reject mantles start simple and have a hell of a time growing. Even then, there are compromises; Lilith’s versatility comes at the cost of prep time and ritual components, two ways her mantle has to compensate for its absurd pattern storage. Morrigan and Howl can both do a lot more than their mantles were designed for, but they got there by slowly stretching their wings and bending their limits. Teaching your mantle new tricks in steady increments lets you keep the training wheels on for longer, and you need the training wheels. The whole point of a mantle—aside from its tithe to the egregores—is to reduce how much work you have to do to cast spells.”

I lean back in my chair and pick at the sad remains of my omelette. “This is… a lot. I feel like I’m going to need a week just to process it all. At the same time, I can’t help but notice that you’ve left out certain details. Where did you get that book, M? How did you get it? And why did you wait until now to tell me that you’re a wizard? What game are you running?”

She chuckles. “You know me, A, I’ve always gotta play the wild card. You think I’m gonna spill all my secrets in one conversation? The Carny in Canary is still setting up her grand play. Leave me a few twists for the third act, yeah?”

Of course she would be like this. I can’t even really be mad because of course Mordacity would do this to me. Still, I have an idea to appeal to her unique sensibilities. “Okay, I get that, but consider this: you love spoilers. Didn’t you once tell me that you prefer to read a movie’s TV Tropes page before you watch it for the first time? Plus, dropping a third act reveal early in the play would make a headache for Hastur, and I’m getting the distinct feeling that you really don’t like our Gamemaster in Gold.”

“That’s actually an incredibly tempting argument,” Mordacity admits. “Like, it genuinely pains me that I have to reject it, because that is a banger. I would love doing that. But my reasons for keeping these secrets are too important to be swayed. Good effort, A.”

I sigh. “Man, who can I even talk to about this? Not the nerds on Discord unless your spell works across the internet. Not Sophia without first revealing my identity to her.”

“You can talk to me,” Mordacity says cheerfully. “I’ll be around more often now that we’ve gotten the big reveal out of the way. Though, we should probably bring this conversation to an end. You don’t want to stay up too late and break your sleep schedule only two days before your big date, do you?”

Oh shit. I bolt upright. It’s almost date night. Aquarium time. Sophia time. “Fuck, you’re right, I need to get home.”

“I’ll send you back,” Mordacity assures me. “I’ll be staying here for a bit longer; I have some business in the area.”

I squint at her suspiciously. “This ‘business,’ would it happen to involve raiding more cosplay cafes or buying anime merch?”

“The schemes of a wizard are inscrutable. But, before I send you on your way, I do want to give one last bit of advice. You asked me how to kill a god, earlier. It’s a question I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about.” The cold anger is back in the twist of her smile and the light of her eyes. “Perhaps there’s a way to tear an egregore along its aspects, turning love against beauty to rip Venus in half. Perhaps you could make another god in place of one, usurping Mars as the preeminent god of war. But I think the best way to kill a god is to eat it. Devour them whole. Take everything they have. There’s a song lyric that’s been stuck in my head: ‘Anything can be eaten/Even if you say no.’ Give them hell, A. And good luck.”

Then she taps my hand and I’m back in Forks, seated at one of the tables on the rooftop terrace. Home. The fireworks have petered out, though the night sky is still clear.

I sit there for a little while longer, thinking about Sophia and how to kill a god.

[commentary]

Wizard shit.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 11th of January.

[/commentary]

[placeholder for bad end otome]

On New Year’s Eve, I go stargazing. The apartment I share with Sophia is in a complex that isn’t quite as nice as the one where I’ve hidden away my secret streaming apartment, but it has a rooftop terrace with a good view. I invited Sophia to join me, but she said she’d probably be out late again.

Pandora is waiting for me when I reach the roof.

“Hello again, Ms. Emily,” the cat greets me in its pleasant, empty voice. “Are you adapting well to your new position within the Visage corporation? We’ve been watching your activities there with great interest. Streaming for an audience, having play fights with other idols, planning your presentation. It’s all very entertaining.” The cat tilts its head. “But we’re still trying to understand how this will further your goal of defeating Strix Striga.”

I’ve been expecting this conversation for some time. The Jovians recruited me to be their silver bullet against Striga, the secret weapon that could finally put an end to her meddling. The surface layer of that is the conflict between sidereals and solars—the patrons of witches and magical girls, respectively—but I know better now. The Jovians are a united organization, and they want Striga gone because she’s discovered the true nature of their game.

Striga and I have prepped for this encounter, though Striga’s coaching on the matter lacked the critical context of her own not-so-secret identity. Still, I’m not caught panicking. We don’t know for certain how much the Jovians know about the conspiracy’s activities, but we have to operate as if our operational security is intact. If the Jovians can pierce wards—if they can see deeper into human hearts than the Morrigan believes—then this entire conspiracy has been doomed from the start. So we must act as if we’ve deceived them, and we must act to maintain that deception. We all have our roles to play.

I walk past the cat and lean over the half-wall railing around the edge of the roof, admiring the stars above. The night sky isn’t normally this clear in the middle of Forks, but Radiance uses her power to mess with local light pollution every New Year’s Eve for a better fireworks show. “It’s a lot of fun,” I confide in the cat. “The money is good, too, but the sheer thrill of performing for a crowd, even a crowd I can’t directly see, is electric. It’s actually surprised me how much I’ve been enjoying this gig with Visage.”

Pandora waits for the rest of my answer, tail gently waving.

I let a smug smile creep across my face. “It’s actually quite satisfying to hear that the all-seeing aliens are unsure of my actions. Here’s hoping that means Striga herself won’t see it coming, because that’s half of why I’m doing this; I’m lulling her into a false sense of security about the threat that I pose to her. By day, I lose fake fights to magical girls and make a fool of myself for mortals with money. By night, I spend that money on tech from Ferromancer to feed my furnace. I’ve kept training with her, you know. Or, do you?” I raise an eyebrow.

“There are certain places we find difficult to peer into from outside,” Pandora admits. “Many domains are warded for privacy. Ferromancer’s workshop is one of those places. The Ossuary is another.” The cat’s tail flicks once and then stills. “On that topic, we were hoping you could shed light on a situation that we’ve been puzzling over. Last Halloween, we noted the arrival of various witches to the Ossuary, yourself and Ferromancer included. One witch never emerged: Delilah, who you met during the demonstration at the workshop. You wouldn’t happen to know what happened to her, would you?”

An interesting change of attack. I flick my eyes up as if trying to remember something. “The witch with the spider mask?” I frown. “I didn’t see her that night, no. She didn’t seem the social type.”

I could leave it at that, and maybe I should, but there’s a thought that’s been gnawing at me since Halloween: do the Jovians trust Ferromancer? She insists that she’s tried her damnedest to get in their inner circle and has only ever been rebuffed, but they placed their silver bullet in her care. Was I a test for the artificer? Do they suspect her true allegiances? Or, worse, has Ferromancer gotten around her oath and deceived the Morrigan and Striga, her true loyalty to the Jovians all along?

That last one feels more like paranoia than anything else, but I can’t discount the possibility that my induction into Striga’s conspiracy has been part of a deeper game the Jovians are running. I can’t underestimate the opposition… though overestimating them is a problem all its own.

“I’m surprised you didn’t ask Ferromancer first,” I say, having paused for only a moment to gather my thoughts. “I asked her about Delilah at one point, curious why she’d been invited to the demo, and Ferromancer seemed to have history with her. Deep history. I’m pretty sure they’ve fucked.”

“We do not typically take an interest in the personal lives of our agents,” Pandora says diplomatically. “As for Ferromancer, she pleaded ignorance of the matter. Alas, our investigation shall continue.”

I turn around to put my back to the ledge and give the cat a look of mischievous curiosity. “Do you think the Morrigan is hiding witches in her basement or something? Or, wait, would that break hospitality? I’ve been studying pocketspaces and I’m pretty sure her power inside the Ossuary is contingent on following her own rules. I’d assume her ability to expel people would stop her from doing the opposite and keeping people trapped. Still, if anyone could find a loophole, I bet it’d be her.”

“Perhaps. We find it more likely that Delilah emerged from the Ossuary into a location we were not actively monitoring.” The cat’s tail flicks again. “No matter. Delilah was a piece of little importance in the greater game. You are far more valuable to our efforts, Ms. Emily.”

“Of course I am,” I preen. “I’m one of a kind.”

“Oh, yes,” Pandora agrees. “You are always a very interesting individual to watch. Are you looking forward to your date night with Sophia?”

My skin crawls and for a heartbeat I almost flinch. Get that name out of your filthy, lying mouth, you wretched spawn of Jupiter. “Of course,” I say. Was that too calm? Should I be excited, or is it appropriate to be nervous?

“It is my sincerest hope, Ms. Emily, that you will not be satisfied with this new routine. It would be a great shame if you ceased your efforts to overcome Strix Striga. That was, after all, the purpose for which you were empowered.” Pandora’s voice does not change, still perfectly pleasant and devoid of real emotion.

“If I did give up on that goal, what would you do about it?” I ask. I keep my voice careful and curious. Don’t make it sound like a challenge. The Rachel who isn’t compromised doesn’t know they can’t take away her powers.

But the Jovian doesn’t give a bluff I could call. “We would simply give Striga a good enough reason to break her promise about those Friday nights. Given a choice between the city and you, well… you already know which she would choose, don’t you? Time with your precious Sophia will never be a certainty when she’s still Striga at heart, striving endlessly to save the world from every possible threat. You can’t have Sophia to yourself until you are Striga’s sole priority, and that can’t happen until you can beat her. You know this.”

I swallow. This time, I let my nervousness show. “I haven’t forgotten our deal,” I say quietly. “And I know what’s at stake. I will make her mine. I’ll give her so much pleasure and joy that she won’t care about the sidereals, won’t care about fighting witches. And if that isn’t enough… I have other ideas.”

“Oh?” The cat tilts its head.

I smile coldly. “I’ve been thinking about what it means that the name of my power is Prometheus. Shaper of clay. Thief of fire. So far, I’ve only stolen trinkets and I’ve only shaped toys. But, I wonder… what else could I shape? What else could I steal? What does it mean, Pandora, to steal a human heart? What does it mean to shape a human mind? Perhaps those are limits I should explore.” My voice hardens. “Perhaps somewhere down that path lies the key to besting the most dangerous magical girl in the world. I’m not going to beat the perfect warrior in a month, cat. I told you, I’m working on it. Just give me time.”

Pandora purrs. “Of course. That sounds like a very productive line of inquiry, Ms. Emily. I do hope you find results.”

And then the cat is gone. I do not sag. I do not sigh. There’s no reason to believe they aren’t still watching.

But I do find a nice corner, lay down, and stare up at the stars.

It’s almost midnight. The fireworks will be starting soon. Sophia isn’t here, and I doubt she’ll show up. It was a vain hope, but I wanted to see her again. I wanted another chance to confess. I’d probably just chicken out like last time.

The clock ticks down. The light pollution removal is just a publicity stunt for Radiance—a purely mercenary act to garner goodwill—but I still appreciate it. I can make out constellations, though I only know a few.

Orion and his belt. Canis Major and Canis Minor. The Pleiades.

It’s incredible how many stars are out there. I wonder how many of them are host to other worlds, with other people gazing up at different skies. Before the Jovians came along, astronomers looked for planets in habitable zones around stars, a slim fraction of the universe, and picked out examples that might feasibly support life. But now magic is real. Could there be worlds out there born of magic? Planets that exist because a being like Hastur willed them to exist? How many? Humanity isn’t alone in the universe anymore. Maybe, when all this business with the egregores is settled, we’ll find out just how not alone we truly are.

It’s the kind of thing I know my friends find interesting, but I so rarely find it in me to care. What do other worlds matter when I can’t have what I want in this one? The stars are pretty, but they’re not Sophia’s smile.

Come on, Sophie. Make it. I want to watch the fireworks with you.

Midnight hits. The sky is filled with light. Colors and shapes decorate the night, replacing the beauty of the stars with human artifice. Sophia doesn’t show.

I sigh. I knew it was too much to hope for. At least the aquarium will be nice.

The door opens and I hear footsteps approaching. My heart jumps and I clamber upright, whipping my head around to see who it is.

“Sup, A?”

Slouching by the entrance to the rooftop terrace is the gangliest beanpole of a woman I’ve ever seen. Square glasses over beady eyes, chewed lips stretched in an unsettling grin, and stringy hair that clearly isn’t being taken care of. Red sneakers, blue jeans, and a black leather jacket covered in pins for anarchist movements and nerd media in equal proportion. Atop it all, a pointy blue hat speckled with glow-in-the-dark stars that I know for a fact were glued on by hand.

It’s Mordacity.

“What the hell are you doing here!?” I ask in disbelief.

My best friend cackles maniacally. “I said I’d be here in January, didn’t I? And if you check your cellular device, I think you’ll find that it is January the 1st ON THE DOT! Nyeheheh!”

I roll my eyes, grinning despite myself, and saunter over. “You absolute clown.”

“Bitch, I’m the whole damn circus.” Mordacity holds out her fist and I bump it affectionately. As is tradition, she winces and wrings her hand as if I put any amount of force into the gesture.

“You little shit. You fucker. How did you even know I was going to be here?”

“A, this is your house.”

“It’s the apartment complex around my house, sure. Mord, we’re on the roof.”

“Yeah, okay.” Mordacity smirks. “Let’s call it an educated guess. We could also call it ‘I saw you leaning over the side while almost to the building,’ but that takes away from my stunningly good wits.”

I snort. “That’ll do it. Alright, you bitch, what’d you bring me?”

She raises a bushy eyebrow slowly and dramatically. “Bring you? What am I, your maid? You gotta pay to see me in the maid dress, A.”

I click my tongue at her. “Enough sass, henchwoman. We have a tradition to uphold and everywhere that sells booze is probably closed right now. Gimme.”

Mordacity chuckles and fishes a bottle of tequila out of her jacket. I have no idea how she made the bottle fit without bulging, but I can’t find it in me to be surprised when she follows that up with pulling out a whole lime. “I’ve got a knife for the lime but you’re gonna need to hold the bottle while I cut it.”

“You never disappoint,” I say with a sigh. My smile is warm.

We drink straight out of the bottle, passing it back and forth between us with exaggerated reactions and the faintest bit of mindfulness that this stuff is 40% alcohol and we probably shouldn’t chug the whole thing. We munch on the lime halves between “shots,” which adds a fascinating new dimension of discomfort to the experience. Mordacity loves food and drink that bites back more than anyone I’ve ever met.

There are chairs on the terrace, but we put our backs to the railing—Mord insists on calling it a parapet—and sit on the floor. Feels more natural that way.

“Damn,” Mord says after we finally set down the bottle and let the alcohol wash over us. “You ever wonder what Mars and Venus are up to?”

“Huh?” A bolt of panic and confusion cuts through the rising haze of tequila. She’s not talking about them, right? What—

“Y’know, Jupiter vanished, so you gotta think maybe it’ll happen to the other planets, right? Our cordial solar neighbors could be next, and then bam, whole system’s out of alignment. Gotta be fucking up gravity, yeah? Not like, gravity gravity, not our gravity, but like… the way everything tugs on everything else. Little changes in the tides and shit.”

I relax. “Right, yeah. Probably.”

“Or did you think I was talking about the egregores?”

My eyes go wide. Mordacity has the world’s most shit-eating grin plastered across her face. “How do you—wait, if the Jovians are—”

Mordacity waves a hand and laughs. “Those amateurs? Nah, they can’t hear you. Not while you’re with me, at least. I’ve got a privacy spell running. A twist of the veil, let’s call it.”

A spell. A twist of the veil. “You have magic. You’re a magical girl.” My thoughts are racing through the fog and in annoyance I purge all the alcohol from my system so I can think clearly. Mordacity has magic. My best friend has magic. How long has she been a magical girl? Why did she never tell me? Why didn’t she tell me when I told her I was a witch!?

“Nah, magical girls are cute but that ain’t my style.”

“Right, of course you’d be a witch.” Wait, is she that witch who based all her familiars on World of Warcraft monsters? I heard that anecdote from Ferromancer, does Mord know Ferro?

“Also no.”

“What?” My train of thought decouples its engine. “What do you mean? If you’re not a magical girl then you have to be a witch, right? How else could you cast a spell? Bitch, if you are fucking with me then I swear to god I am going to fly you up to Rainier and leave you there.”

Mordacity cackles and rises to her feet. I follow her up, arms crossed, and then watch as she steps onto the half-wall and spreads her arms wide. “C’mon, A, everything you learned in the World of Glass and you still think magic is so damn binary? I’m not a magical girl and I’m not a witch ‘cause I’m not any kind of mantlebearer, A. Not a champion like your little girlfriend, either. I don’t answer to an egregore and I didn’t bargain with one of their pets. Nah, it’s not like that at all.”

She takes a step back and her foot stops midair, then her other foot after it. She stands on an invisible platform and snaps her fingers. A ball of fire flares to life in her right hand, and then her left shoots out and grabs something. She pulls a raven-headed staff out of thin air, twirls it once, and plants it on the invisible platform.

“I… am a motherfucking wizard.”

[placeholder for bad end otome]

Rachel: heyyyy a friend invited me over to play magic

Rachel: but!

Rachel: im not far i can be back super quick

Sophia: Ah, don’t worry about it. I’m sure you weren’t expecting me back home at any reasonable time, so please don’t rush around on my behalf.

Rachel: ah, but consider: i could go home and say hi to you

Sophia: Seriously, Rachel, if you’re out with a friend then you don’t need to leave them for my sake. That wouldn’t be fair to either of you.

Rachel: they wont mind! promise!

Rachel: i can be back in five minutes tops

Sophia: It’s fine. I could use the extra sleep anyway. You know how ragged I run. But, we’ll hang out tomorrow. I’ll cook breakfast.

Sophia: Night.

---

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!

I want to scream and throw my phone against the wall and set my hair on fire. I want to swim to the bottom of the Mariana Trench and become food for shrimp. If I got up on stage in front of the entire population of Earth and told them all my most embarrassing secrets I still wouldn’t feel as bad as I do right now.

Sophia came home early and I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there for her. I could have been with Sophia and instead I’m playing a dumb card game with people I barely know and Sophia is alone at home without me. This is the worst case scenario. Forget the lesbians in the Ossuary, this is my new 9/11.

I stand up abruptly in the middle of Erica’s turn. “Hey, so, thanks for the food and games, but I should really go.”

Erica stops fiddling with her combo and raises an eyebrow at me. “Work stuff?”

That would be a good excuse, but she could verify it too easily. Should I bluff anyway and deal with the consequences later? No, I’ve already waited too long. “Personal stuff,” I say curtly, and then I scoop up my cards and fit them in their deck box.

“Well, thanks for coming over!” Eli says.

Dave says, “Yeah, it was a fun game, I’m happy to play another round any time.”

“For sure,” I say quickly. “You have a lovely home and it was an amazing dinner. Thank you again, and sorry for the rushed ending! See you some other time!”

I scurry for the door and throw on my jacket and scarf. Erica, to my displeasure, catches up to me and lays a hand on the doorknob. The other witch gives me a searching look. “This is about that girl, isn’t it?” she says in a low, wry voice.

I glare at her. “Of course it is, so get out of my way.”

“What did she say?” Erica asks. “Did she call you home like a dog?” She’s grinning at me, mocking me, practically sneering. “Or is that all you? You’d run after her no matter what she said, right?”

My face reddens. Shut up, shut up, shut up! “It’s none of your business.” I make my voice as cold as possible, but I can’t stop my fist from clenching.

Erica laughs. “You’re about to leave a nice evening with friends and food to go running off after a girl that doesn’t even want you. I bet she told you to stay, didn’t she? I bet she’d rather you spend the night with someone who isn’t her.”

Doesn’t even want you. Told you to stay. Someone who isn’t her. That isn’t true. My Sophia has to want me. She’s just tired, but once I go to her she’ll be happy to see me. She likes me. We’re going to be together. I won’t accept another world. “Hey, Erica,” I say lightly, banishing my mounting anger to a pulsating node in the back of my mind. “I think we should continue this conversation outside, so why don’t you take your hand off the door?”

“Yeah? Think you can run away that easily?” She leaves her hand where it is.

I smile. “Well, I wouldn’t want to make your nice friends have to clean your blood out of their pretty walls and carpet.”

She gives me an appraising look. I summon a knife, let it hang in my hand, and meet her gaze with iron, unflinching will.

Try me. Give me a reason. Let me put you in your place.

She lets go of the doorknob. “Damn, girl. Guess Howl was right about you. Go on then, chase after your hero. See where it gets you.” She walks away with a whistle, but I stopped paying attention halfway through her little speech.

I’m out the door in a flash and transform a second later, sparing only a moment’s glance to make sure no one is watching. I fly through the rain at top speed, droplets sizzling off my Prometheus-granted body heat. The suburbs are far from our apartment, but it’s not a distance that means anything to magical flight. I’m home in minutes, just like I promised.

I check my surroundings even more carefully when I transform back, mindful of how I discovered Striga’s secret identity. I stand outside in the rain for another minute before entering the complex, letting the water soak in so I won’t look suspiciously dry for the weather.

Sophia, Sophia, Sophia. My heart pounds. It’s Christmas Eve. A holiday. Could this be the night that I tell Sophia how I feel? When I step inside our apartment, will she look up with sudden warmth, happily surprised to see me home? Will I catch a glimpse of that radiant, precious smile?

I don’t. The apartment is dark and cool as I enter. With a sinking feeling, I move to Sophia’s door and press my ear against it. No sounds of movement. No light from beneath.

I think about knocking, but if she’s already asleep then it would be rude to wake her. Quietly, carefully, I open the door.

Sophia is sleeping, passed out on her bed with the covers clumsily draped across her. Her breathing is steady, an even rise and fall of her chest. Her angelic face is relaxed, mouth hanging slightly open, eyelids not yet fluttering with dreams.

The poor thing. She must have been exhausted.

I stand in the doorway, watching her, for minutes. Five, maybe ten. I don’t keep count. I just stare at her perfect face, drinking in the sight of her. My darling. My hero. My Sophia.

---

I’m woken up by the aroma of fresh breakfast. Groggy, curled up on the couch, I fumble for my phone to check the time.

“Morning, sunshine!” Sophia calls over cheerfully. “Merry Christmas.”

I bolt upright. It’s Christmas Day. It’s a holiday. “You’re making breakfast?” I ask.

“You’ve done it for me a few times lately, so I thought I’d return the favor. It’s nice to eat together and not be rushing off anywhere, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” I watch her stir a pan of what smells like sausage. “Sorry again about last night.”

Sophia laughs. “You don’t need to apologize, Rachel. I’m the one who… it’s fine, really. Alright, order up!”

Maple sausage links, cantaloupe chunks, and eggs sunny side up, washed down with a glass of orange juice. A delicious breakfast, made all the better because my beloved made it for me. I savor every bite.

We make meaningless small talk. I learn details about her vet work, most of which is probably true, and in exchange I share funny conversations with friends. There’s a hole in our dialogue shaped like witches and magical girls.

“Hey, do you want to go for a walk?” she asks me once breakfast is devoured and the dishes are put away. “I know it’s not snowing, but it’ll be nice to get out while there’s no one else around. You like liminal spaces, right?”

My heart beats faster. “Sure! Gray skies are almost as good as snow anyway.”

We walk the streets of Forks beneath endless clouds, the city still damp after a night of hard rain. Sophia is adorable as always in a soft green sweater and a tree-patterned beanie. Her breath mists slightly in the cool morning air, and I find myself wishing I could bottle it to keep a private reserve.

“I like spending time with you,” I say. “I wish I got to do it more often. That’s why I felt so bad about missing you last night.”

Sophia winces. “That’s my fault. I… I know I’m always too busy, but it feels normal to me. For the longest time, you were always there, waiting for me at home, and I… I guess I started taking that for granted. Taking you for granted. And I’m so, so sorry for that.”

 “It’s fine!” I say quickly. I mean, it’s not really fine. It hurts so, so much, and I’ve been hurting for so long. But Sophia can hurt me as much as she likes. I’ll always let her. “I don’t mind being your rock. I mean, hey, it’s not like the past however many years would make you expect anything else from me. I’ve been the rock sitting on your couch.”

Sophia smiles warmly. “And I liked that. It was nice always having you around. But, I’m really happy that you’ve been making more friends and finding other things to do with your time. You’ve felt more alive, Rachel. And that’s been wonderful. I like seeing that. I just… also like seeing you.”

Oh my god oh my god oh my god I’m so gay I want to kiss you so badly aaaaa!!! “I like seeing you, too,” I say lamely instead of screaming about my desperate need to push Sophia against a tree and bury myself in her mouth. “I wish I could see you more often.” Because I love you and I need you and you’re the only thing that completes me.

Sophia grins. “Well, now you can!” I blink. “I’m making a commitment: one night a week, every week, I’m going to make time for you, and if work or anyone else tries to call me then they’re going to find my phone turned off. No interruptions. No emergencies. Only us.”

Date night. Date night every week. Date night with Sophia every week. Only us. Only us. Only us. “Can you get away with that?” I ask, projecting concern to hide the explosions happening in my brain.

“Of course I can,” she says smugly. “I’m me.” Then she sighs, the exhaustion seeping back in. “I know I do too much. I am buried in responsibility, but you know what? I do enough. If anyone begrudges me taking one night off—not even a full day—each week, then they can burn in hell. One night a week, only us.”

I smile. “That sounds perfect. Thank you.” Date night. Only us. Date night. Only us.

If anyone tries to stand between us—tries to take Sophia away from me—then they can burn in hell. They can all burn, and I would happily burn them. I would break the world to take it from your shoulders.

This is the time. This is my moment. So why can’t I summon the words?

I need to tell Sophia that I love her. I need to tell her that I’m Archon. I need to share everything with her so that we can be together. But the words are sticking in my throat. Fear is rising like bile.

What if she rejects me? What if she doesn’t want to be with me? What if I ruin a good thing right as it gets better? What if those date nights never happen because I scare her off?

No, no, no! I conquered this! I swallowed my fears against the deimovore, so why are they coming back now? I thought I was over this! But here and now, in the moment, staring at Sophia’s beautiful, smiling face as we walk the empty streets together, I can’t find my voice.

I love you.

I’ve always loved you.

I need you.

I’ve always needed you.

Please love me back.

I force my mouth to move. “So. On that topic.”

Sophia glances over at me, then down at her phone, which she’d pulled out while I was ruminating. Her expression shifts into a scowl. “Shit. Now, really?” She starts rapidly typing, and my heart sinks. Not again. Not now. “Ugh. Rachel, do you—”

“It’s fine,” I say quietly. “If you have to go, I understand.”

I can almost taste the pain in her eyes, bright and bitter like grapes gone rotten. “Hey. I meant what I said. I’m going to get things set up with the people I need to tell, and then those nights are ours. First Friday of the new year, how about that? You can pick what we do. Maybe we can go see a movie. It’ll happen. I promise.”

“Okay.” I force a smile. “I’m looking forward to it. Let’s go to an aquarium.” A romance can’t call itself yuri until the girls have been to an aquarium together. That’s a rule.

A bit of joy returns to her expression. “I’d love that. Okay, gotta run!”

And then she’s gone, hurrying away to do who cares what. Leaving me alone.

I should have said it. I should have told her.

But, as much as I hate to admit it, a part of me is relieved that I didn’t. The fear ebbs out. I haven’t ruined everything. And now, or in a little over a week, I get to go on a date with Sophia.

Maybe this is better. Maybe this way, I can work up to my confession more naturally. I mean, god, imagine just dumping a love confession on someone out of nowhere. Even if she likes me back, that would probably be all kinds of disorienting. Better to do it… more naturally.

I can flirt on our dates, feel out her boundaries, try to gently build up to it. And I get to spend more time with Sophia. This wasn’t a failure. It wasn’t a failure. It was… a stepping stone. A waystation on my journey to stealing Sophia’s heart.

Of course, that still leaves me alone on Christmas. I sigh and start walking home. I guess there’s always more work I could be doing.

[commentary]

I know a few people have been frustrated with the wait on Rachel’s confession. Explaining characterization isn’t really going to do anything about that, but I do hope the promise of actual dates will do something. They might not call each other girlfriends, but like… these are dates. They’re dating.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

For the third time this week, it’s raining in Forks. That is not, in itself, particularly exceptional, but I think I deserve a little bit of grumbling about it not snowing on Christmas Eve. Does the weather not have any respect for tradition? For symbolism?

I’m bundled up in a fluffy coat from one of the nicer stores at the mall and a bootleg Strix Striga scarf I found on Etsy. I trudge through the damp streets, my umbrella sheltering me from the worst of the sky’s tantrum, as I double-check the address sitting in my texts.

The house I’m looking for is in one of the nicer suburbs of Forks. It’s a pretty home, very picket fence, the kind of clean and elegant structure that you’d be tempted to call manicured if you were searching for synonyms. Two stories tall. From the sidewalk I can just make out the faintest hints of a garden space out back that looks like it has a pond feature. Quaint.

Ferromancer’s car is parked in the driveway, so I guess the address was right.

I trundle up to the covered porch and shake the water off my umbrella before knocking. Then I think twice about knocking, because this is a house, not an apartment, which means it has an actual doorbell. I feel like I haven’t seen one of those in person for ages. I ring the bell and wait.

Almost immediately I hear footsteps approaching, and a second later the door swings open. Standing in the doorway is a man that I feel compelled to describe as having a professorial affect, though my experience with professors is rather limited by my early dropout. He has round glasses that I want to call spectacles, a scruffy beard, and a twinkle in his eye. He’s also wearing a gaudy Christmas sweater emblazoned with an image of Santa Claus and the words, “He knows if you’ve violated the categorical imperative.”

“You must be Rachel, right?” he says, smiling brightly. “Dave Torald, call me Dave. Erica told me you were coming. She said you were a work friend.”

“I have been known by such a title,” I say, putting on a faux-solemn voice for only a moment before grinning and adding, “But yeah, that’s me. Rachel Emily, the girl with two first names. Almost no one uses my last name, though.”

Dave waves me inside and gestures to a coat rack by the door where a few pieces of outerwear are already hanging. I feel like I’ve stepped into another world. I hang up my coat and scarf, find another hook for my umbrella, and admire the modern interior of the house. Very minimalist, but lots of plants.

“So how did that happen?” Dave asks. “The two first names thing.”

“Oh, it’s all the fault of the British,” I lament. “English ancestry on my father’s side. Frankly, I blame my mother for not insisting on her surname. I could have been Rachel Hunter, that would have been fucking badass.”

Dave laughs. “Hey, it’s never too late to change it! My husband—”

“Oh? Are we talking about moi?”

The most handsome man I’ve ever seen descends the foyer stairwell and drapes himself across the handrail. He’s got one of those looks that’s impossible to maintain without a strict regiment of product and dieting, from his shiny, well-groomed hair to his perfect pores and teeth. I’m a Kinsey 6, so even that isn’t enough to get an attraction response, but it’s hard not to appreciate the work of art in front of me. His outfit is elaborate and layered, a carefully put together arrangement of high-class apparel, except for the Kuromi shirt beneath it all.

Dave looks at his husband with exasperated fondness. “Well, I was about to talk about you, but clearly you’d prefer the privilege.”

The other man springs forward and sticks his hand out with a grin. “Eli Split, at your service. When your marriage is on the rocks and it’s time to make the split, call Eli Split for all your divorce attorney needs. I also make a mean macaroni.”

After introductions, Dave and Eli show me to the dining room. Erica pops out of the kitchen with a beer in hand on hearing us enter. “Glad you could make it,” she says to me. “Now let’s eat, I’m starving.”

Christmas dinner is, thankfully, not recycled Thanksgiving slop. No turkey and stuffing, no sad side of unloved vegetables. Instead, we get well-seasoned ham hash with a side of artichoke hearts drowned in buttery lemon sauce. Our hosts bring out eggnog, cranberry juice, and a selection of alcohol to mix with the eggnog, of which Dave and Eli both partake. I go with the juice.

Erica prods Eli into talking about his pet snake, Bartholomew, who has been thriving in the new enclosure that Erica built for him. Eli insists on showing me a reel of snake pictures, and I have to admit, the reptile is pretty cute. Snakes look incredibly dumb from a surprising number of angles.

Dave asks about Erica’s work and gets the same story about the magical girl weed shop that I heard a month ago. I was warned ahead of time that Dave and Eli know what Erica is, but it’s still interesting to see such casual conversation about it. I guess they are to Erica what Mike, Femur, and Mord are to me.

“So, how did you become friends with Erica?” I ask at a natural lull.

“Oh, we met in college,” Dave answers. “Shared a few classes, but we were only vaguely aware of each other until late second year. That was when the Jovians came to Earth and everything changed. I’d been waffling around between various social sciences, trying to get some use out of my background in debate, but that woke me up. I got super into philosophy, started taking all these classes trying to understand how the existence of magic upended all our previous assumptions about the nature of the universe. I’d been struggling with religion at the time and now suddenly everyone was struggling with it because what did it mean for God and the soul that a bunch of alien cats could come along and make certain women immortal? And why only women? I knew a pastor—family friend, super reasonable guy before then—who started ranting that witches were agents of Satan, but then I open up YouTube and I’m seeing clips of them playing video games with magical girls. I wanted to know what the philosophers had to say. I wanted to understand the biggest paradigm shift since the Enlightenment.”

“And so did I,” Erica jumps in. “Someone close to me had opened my eyes to how sheltered I’d been not long before that, and then along comes magic. Dave and I met for real in those philosophy classes, both of us trying our damnedest to warp every discussion around what it meant that magic was real and the implications of how it was manifesting. We hit it off, started hanging outside of class, met each other’s partners, and he got me hooked on his card game hobby.”

Eli waves. “Hi! I was the partner.”

And Erica’s partner was Delilah. I glance at her. “And then…”

The witch sighs. “And then the Jovians happened. At first, it enlivened our discussions; with firsthand access to magic, we could test our speculation, experiment and try to understand the system up close. But then the Syndicate got its hooks in me and it stopped being about comprehension. All I wanted was another advantage over my rivals. Our friendship became… exploitative. He cut me off, I said some things I shouldn’t have, and then… well, you know the rest. I got my wakeup call, and I left. Took me two years to apologize and reconnect.”

“It took me about as long to accept the apology,” Dave admits, “but eventually I did, and we’ve been in touch ever since. Mostly online.”

Erica says, “I tried to pop by at least once a year, but I was avoiding Forks for good reason. Still, it’s been nice to talk philosophy in person again.”

“I’ve been chewing on that last hypothetical you threw at me,” Dave says with a nod to Erica. “The Gnostic angle… I can see the ways it could fit, though I really hope it doesn’t.”

I perk up. “Oh, hey, that’s a philosophy thing I know. Well, sort of know. I looked up a bunch of Wikipedia summaries of Gnosticism to impress a girl.”

Erica snickers. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.

When I was looking for a witch name, I wanted to find something that could serve as a message to Sophia. Turns out, Sophia is a Greek name originally, meaning “wisdom.” Sophia is also the name of one of the most important figures in Gnosticism.

In Gnosticism, everything starts with a godhead, or Monad, that emanates pieces of itself. Through pairings, these emanations continue to divide or reproduce, creating more of themselves, until they get to Sophia, the last piece of God. Rather than pairing off like the others did, Sophia creates something alone: the demiurge, a creature born of chaos. The demiurge, thinking itself alone and thus considering itself the highest power in the universe, exercises its power to create the material world, trapping the divine light in mundane matter. To perform its work more efficiently, the demiurge creates a set of servants to do its bidding and build the universe for it. Those servants were called archons.

Sophia, the girl who stood alone. Archon, the loyal servant of her creation.

Dave nods sagely. “Who hasn’t studied an obscure subject they don’t really care about to impress the object of their affections? But hey, if you’ve got the grounding, maybe you can weigh in. Erica, care to explain your hypothetical?”

“Sure. “ Erica steeples her fingers and gives me a measured look. “It’s a fairly common feeling among scholars of magic that the system as it stands appears… arbitrary. Why are only women granted power? Why are those mantles of power modeled after mythological figures, and why is the system presented as an anime-esque division between witches and magical girls? Why does the endless war between those two sides seem to have no clear victory condition, and why are so many allowed to run off and play pretend instead? It’s a system that would make more sense if its primary purpose were entertainment—if it were a game, designed for the amusement of those who orchestrated it.”

“The Jovians,” I say carefully. “Are you sure that’s a safe topic?”

“The house is warded,” Erica says dismissively. “Set that up as a present years ago.”

“We value our privacy,” Dave says.

“There’s a lot of perverts in the world,” Eli adds with a wink. “I’m sure there are plenty of people, magical or otherwise, who’d like a candid peek at all this.” He gestures to himself.

“Anyway,” Erica continues, “the Jovians are one thing, but I’m interested in looking a step above them. Hence, the Gnostic angle. What if the Jovians aren’t the designers of the game, but merely the facilitators? If they were just servants, created by a higher power, well… that would be its own kind of concerning, wouldn’t it?”

Hastur. She’s talking about Hastur, but talking around the King in Yellow. This isn’t a hypothetical, this is what she knows for a fact is going on. So why… ah. The oath.

The oath we all swore as conspirators was to keep secrets and trust between each other. Erica might trust Dave and Eli, but they haven’t sworn an oath; sharing anything we learned in the World of Glass—at least, sharing it in explicit terms—would constitute a breach of quarantine, enabling that information to spread far, far beyond the conspiracy. A violation.

“I’d find the theological implications troubling,” Dave says. “And it opens up a whole host of questions, though many of them could just as easily apply to the Jovians. How did these magical beings come to exist, and why? Are there more of them out there, tucked away on other planets or hiding somewhere we can’t see? And, if there is a singular will that created the Jovians and designated them as servants, is there anything above that? Are we, in fact, in a Gnostic situation, trapped in a demiurge’s creation while the true light of God remains out of reach? If so… how can we escape? The far worse alternative is that this gamemaster figure is the genuine highest authority, and there is no escape. If that were the case, what would we do? Just play the game and try to win? If winning is even an option.”

“I’d hate that,” Erica says blithely. “I want the universe to run on mathematics, not will.”

Eli hums. “I think if I was faced with a situation like that, I’d refuse to play the game. Like, hey man, fuck you for trying to put me in a box. Ask for consent first.”

But can we really afford to tell Hastur no? “I’d try to win,” I say. “As long as there’s a chance, I’d do whatever it takes.”

It does make me wonder: where does Hastur come from? Was she herself created by a higher being, or merely the infinite chaos of the universe? And, wherever she came from, was she the only one of her kind? Or are there other demiurges, playing games on other worlds?

Above my paygrade! I’ll leave those questions for the thinkers in our little conspiracy to puzzle out. “Okay, that’s enough speculation for me. Philosophy’s cool and all but my brain is not equipped to dig into it. So, Dave, are you a… well, actually, I don’t really know what kinds of jobs philosophers have?”

“Oh, they don’t!” he says cheerfully. “All my philosophy professors told me not to major in philosophy if I wanted to get a job, so I switched to a psych degree and went into marriage counseling. Never looked back.”

I look between Eli, the divorce attorney, and Dave, the marriage counselor. “I see.”

After dinner, Erica brings out cheesecake dessert, and then we transition to the living room to play a game of Magic: the Gathering. Erica asked me to bring a Commander deck, so I brought the Memento deck I’ve been working on for a future stream.

I learn many snake facts as Eli pilots a theme deck which seems more interested in collecting different snake tokens than actually winning the game. Dave spreads chaos by gifting permanents with negative or wacky effects to other players, complete with custom-printed “You’re welcome!” tokens to denote donated cards. Erica has a bizarre deck based on an old line of global enchantments they don’t print anymore that get sacrificed as soon as another enchantment with the same type gets played, so the table rotates every turn through a new effective subrule being added to the game.

It’s fun. My deck is a pretty typical Treasure engine, generating vast piles of artifact tokens that I can sacrifice to cast more spells. Dave complains about the absurd value my commander spits out, I complain about the “gifts” he keeps giving me, and Eli rotates snakes in his corner of the table. I’m pretty sure Erica is about to win the game when I get a text on my phone with the special sound chime I’ve set for Sophia. Immediately, I look away from the game and check my messages.

Sophia: Surprise! I’m home early. Where’d you run off to?

[commentary]

Demiurges are cool. Archons are also cool. It would be so funny if someone wrote a web serial about that called Feast or Famine and no one read it haha anyway.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

It’s another rainy day in the middle of December. I wish it was snowing, but we get most of our snow in the later months of winter. Maybe I’ll get lucky around Christmas.

I stuff my face with leftover sushi from yesterday as I shuffle about my private apartment getting ready for today’s stream. Day-old fish is probably on the lower end of healthy meals, but I can’t get sick, so who cares? The salmon is still delicious.

The nice thing about streaming under transformation is that I don’t actually have to get dressed for the stream, or do makeup or anything like that. I can trundle about in sweatpants and a Memento t-shirt and magic will fix up my appearance before the camera rolls.

I hear that’s a big part of the appeal behind vtuber rigs. Despite Visage’s hard pivot, virtual streamers actually ended up pretty popular on the whole. They don’t have the instant celebrity status of being a lady who can do magic, but there’s actually a couple of independent magical girls who’ve given it a try. Even with transformation giving you free costume updates, there’s a certain appeal to hiding your face completely and not needing to manage any of your microexpressions. Visage streamers, of course, aren’t allowed to use rigs; being a real magical girl (or witch) is part of the branding.

I don’t mind, really. Having to control my face for a wider audience keeps my skills sharp, and besides, lying is fun. I’ve been single-mindedly fixated on Sophia for so long that I’d almost forgotten how enjoyable it is to manipulate people.

I move a bundle of laundry from the washer to the dryer and text my friends.

Alexandria: stream in SOON be there or please be there actually i do in fact need more moderators than my sweet prince automod

Alexandria: dont tell him i said that

Mordacity: I will

Alexandria: treachery most foul

a single femur: Yeah I’m around

Mike Trout: me too! yippee!

Alexandria: poggers gamers let’s get this rolling. gonna do like. an hour or two of chat. then probly gonna draft the ff set.

Mordacity: you should set chat to anarchy mode 🙂 that would be fun

a single femur: My liege, that vizier whispers poison in your ear. Heed not her lies

Alexandria: this is so hard for me because i do love lies but it’s also very funny when mordacity suffers. hmm.

Mordacity: mean to me! mean to your most loyal vizier

a single femur: How dare you grasp at my title

Alexandria: alright viziers it’s time for me to get set up. on in 5

I polish off the last of the sushi and scramble upstairs, transforming as I go. I shrink my wings so they’ll fit in the closet I’ve converted to be my streaming room. It’s actually fairly spacious, but I’ve filled the entire back wall with shelves of Visage merch and I don’t want to keep accidentally knocking down anime figurines.

I really wanted to get cat ear headphones for the e-girl look, but that would obscure the elfin ears I have in this form and Visage is very, very particular about preserving visibility of all obviously magical traits. That means I have to put up with earbuds, which I will lament at every opportunity so long as no one is around to hear it.

Software’s all working. Lights are green. Manager-chan is watching. The clock is counting down. Chat’s waking up.

Deep breath. I was born for moments like this.

The countdown hits zero, the camera fades in, and I’m live.

I tap my chin, lean back in my chair, and muse, “Y’know, I was debating whether to start the stream with an overwrought ASMR voice or a really bro-y gamer voice, and I’m still not sure which would be funnier to hear calling everyone in chat ‘my little pogchamps.’ Alas, my indecision has cost me, just as the old woman in the back alley carnival tent forewarned. Sup, chat? Who wants to talk about magical girls?”

We spend the next hour and a half doing just that.

“Did you see Pearl Princess in the previews for the next Fast and Furious movie? I don’t usually care about car movies but there’s no way I’m missing that one.”

“Oh my god, Dusk and Dawn’s latest vlog exchange was so cute. Dawn’s bunny might be the cutest animal alive, sorry to everyone else’s pets.”

I laugh at clips of my fellow witches—Kira raging at Souls-likes, Sweet Tooth causing mischief on the Minecraft server, Glamour impersonating other Visage members for prank calls—and get my viewers to send in their favorites. I scroll through a Radiance fashion shoot to gawk. Mako—a magical girl with a love of swimming who likes to style herself as a mermaid—activates the horny lesbian unga bunga part of my brain, because how else am I going to respond to a hot girl in a bikini rising out of the water?

“Sonata’s latest music video went hard, that was like, actual big leagues stuff. Who else is going to her concert next month?”

“I own so much Memento merch, you have no idea. I was literally wearing one of her shirts before the stream. Check out this limited edition hoodie I snagged!”

Agatha, of course, merits a rewatch of our fight, a trip through her clips channel, and various wistful sighs to build interest in our storyline. Maenad, the iconic drunken party girl of Visage, hosts a Jackbox night every month that I excitedly daydream about getting in on. Narcissa’s League games, on the other hand, I cannot even pretend to be interested in.

Chat gets in on the action. I’m still developing a sense for my audience, still shaping them in the right direction with signals, praise, and bans.

Maisey197: lol sorry this is kind of weird to say but i feel like you have short person energy do you agree

ForestPup: narcissa is so pretty!!!! i want to put my face. well.

SomeoneNew: hey babe are you from heaven or did you fall from hell cause so hot

Eldritch_Feline: VisageClap NarcissaSmug DawnBunny DuskHmph MementoHeart

SeaFlower: dusk and dawn… uwu

1loveEm0jis: OMG!!! pearl princess is the cutest PearlHeart PearlHeart PearlHeart

nothingeverhappens: It’s all fake, you know. Everything is fake. It’s bullshit.

<M> YouAreTheDodent: And now you’re fake! Enjoy the ban 😀

GothicCatalyst: dae still thinking about archon and agatha??? that look…

When I’ve exhausted all the recent Visage news to talk about, I transition over to gaming. I’ve been chewing over my options and trying to strike a balance so that I’m perceived as a variety streamer and not just a Magic streamer, though that is my primary interest. I played a few gacha games last week, focusing on games with Visage crossovers. I have a few ideas in the works for the Visage Magic cards, in particular seeing which other streamers I can rope into a themed commander game where we all build decks around magical girls.

Tonight, however, I’ve already done my due diligence when it comes to emphasizing my love for the Visage icons. My brand, my niche as part of Visage, is that I’m just like my followers. Sure, I’m a smoking hot witch that can do magic and gets to hang out with other smoking hot magic users, but beneath that, I’m just a nerdy fangirl. Relying only on the Visage connection is cheap, it’s obvious; it’ll work for some, but there are people in my audience who will see the shallowness of that bond and fail to attach. I need more. I need to be the nerd girl of their dreams, the one who will laugh at all their references, the one who gets it, the one who’s real.

You look lonely. I can fix that.

I boot up MTG Arena and start explaining. “So, for those of you who don’t know, Magic is a very cool card game that I have spent a perfectly normal amount of hours playing. But we’re not just playing Magic! We’re going to be playing Final Fantasy.”

I’ve never actually played a Final Fantasy game, despite Mordacity’s exhortations to try the MMO—as a gateway drug to get me to play WoW, she’s made quite clear. RPGs just aren’t really my thing. I have, however, lived on the internet long enough to absorb a shitton of memes about Final Fantasy, and that should be enough to fake familiarity. I can enjoy playing with Magic cards while pointing at any given card in a pack and dropping a line about saving up Ethers or Aerith coming in with the steel chair. The people in my audience will either get those references from playing the games or from the same pop culture osmosis that I went through. Either way, we’re all nerds who like nerd things.

“Oh hey, it’s the bunnygirl. That is one hell of an outfit. Not worth drafting outside my colors, but still.”

“Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the bonus cards with the video game stills, they look really jarring. I wish they’d gone for more concept art instead, like the Amano drawings.”

“Okay, what kind of villain name is Rufus? Like, ‘yes, it was me, the corrupt heir to the sinister corporation destroying the world. My name? Rufus Shinra.’ Alright, buddy.”

“So what’s everyone’s favorite Final Fantasy game? Personally, I think the characters in VI have the best aesthetic. Terra is, like, absurdly pretty, and Kefka’s such a funny-looking freak. The alt art for the Celes card is really nice, too.”

Chat takes the bait, of course.

crowsdanger: bird hype!!!! chocobo chocobo chocobo

Phallicies: aerith and tifa i love them so much LesbianPride

pix: Did you know that Final Fantasy XV was originally supposed to be closely related to XIII as part of the Fabula Nova Crystallis subseries? It went through such a troubled development that by the end of the cycle it had a completely different name and only kept a few vague thematic connections to XIII, with all of the mythological connections completely removed, to the point that some fans argue it shouldn’t be part of the subseries at all.

Deerlibeloved: when will you play Outer Wilds

MsKittycore: I love seeing everyone full of nostalgia MementoHeart PearlHeart RadianceHeart DuskHeart DawnHeart 

MsKittycore: My favorite was IX, I love my boy Vivi so much DawnSob DuskHeart

yticadroM: Final Fantasy XIV is the strictly inferior MMORPG to World of Warcraft and anyone who thinks otherwise is a brainwashed simpleton deceived by flashing lights and rising orchestrals into thinking a mediocre story can make up for an abysmally slow GCD and a complete lack of any gameplay customization system comparable to talent trees

yticadroM: FURTHERMORE

<M> 13thousandClavicles: Okay, into the timeout corner with the other children

GreenPotato: you should have picked blitzball shot over sazh chocobo way higher rated

SinisterEvilFlower: what are you talking about it’s literally two tiers lower on draftsim

GreenPotato: you still use draftsim? amateur

I indulge chat in their nonsense. I don’t trophy any of my drafts—I don’t get seven wins, the maximum you can get in an event—but I do alright. I play up performative rage about not drawing enough lands, insist I could have won more of my games if I’d only made completely different decisions at multiple points in each, and generally act the part of the typical player.

With my last game of the evening finished, I set my camera back to fullscreen and sign off. “Thanks for joining the stream, everyone! Really great to see so many new people, and I hope you all had a lot of fun watching me lose terribly at Magic. I won’t be streaming again until after Christmas, so, see you then! Happy holidays! Byyyyye!”

The chat fills up with emote spam before I close the window, stretch, and let out a sigh of relief. That went alright. Room for improvement.

I leave my streaming closet behind and immediately open up my phone to harass my nerd friends in the group chat.

Alexandria: smh terrible work your salaries will be cut by 400%

a single femur: Our glorious queen, we are banning 60 users per day as you commanded, all sacrificed in your name.

Alexandria: okay but how many of those are mordacity

Mordacity: I’m helping!

a single femur: She is a very illustrative example of what not to do

Mike Trout: “a very illustrative example” is distinctly on the Dracula side of the Femur-Dracula scale

Mordacity: would dracula have opinions about twitch users?

Mordacity: i wonder if phage has opinions about twitch users. i should ask her

Mike Trout: I think that you should not do that

a single femur: As if you could

Mike Trout: and I think that if Dracula were made of nanomachines, which he is, he would be inherently interested in all technology that can be coopted into the nanomachine cloud responsible for his supposedly supernatural abilities

Alexandria: when did you freaks get obsessed with dracula

Mike Trout: alex I have always been obsessed with vampires and I am frankly offended that you are just now noticing

Mordacity: smh it’s like we don’t even exist to you outside of these conversations

Mike Trout: like we are… philosophical zombies. of the fish variety.

a single femur: As opposed to the human variety? Why are we fish?

Mike Trout: I think that fish would make for more efficient p-zombies

Mordacity: how do you get more efficient? it’s a binary state

Alexandria: okay i’m super fucking tired from all that so i’m going to crash thank you for all you do for me

Mordacity: ofc

Alexandria: not you

Mordacity: wow! whore!

a single femur: Good night, Alexandria. Sleep well

I am exhausted after that stream, but I’m also weirdly exhilarated, so sleep might not be in the cards. I want to run a mile. I want to stare at the wall for an hour.

I want to kiss Sophia and run my fingers through her hair and down her back to undo her bra and—well. I want to do things to her.

Christmas is almost here. My next chance to tell her how I feel.

Still, for all that the holiday weighs on my mind, it’s actually not what I spend the evening thinking about. I have more ideas for streams, ideas for how I can shape my audience and build my brand. I know it’s all just infiltration, but I’m taking it seriously. I want to be popular. I want to be adored.

For too many years, the only attention I ever cared about earning was Sophia’s. Now, there are thousands of people tuning in every week to watch me dick around playing card games or gushing over magical girls. There’s something intoxicating about that kind of interest. I want more followers, more fans, more fanatics. I want people to talk about me the way I talk about Sophia. I want them to love me. To adore me. To worship me.

I think I’m beginning to understand what it means to think like Venus.

[commentary]

We should all think more like Venus. I can see no problems with that.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

Lights. Camera. Action.

Agatha Cain takes the stage, entering the commandeered museum hall resplendent in her signature outfit. That corset! Those boots! Keen-eyed Agatha steps through the archway, those piercing rainbow orbs sweeping across the scene and taking it all in. Our heroine came prepared for violence, her tome of lore at the ready, but even the quick-witted detective wasn’t expecting to find her own face staring back at her—and in triplicate, no, hextuplicate!

Six eerie dolls watch Agatha from around the empty museum wing, their plastic faces devoid of emotion. Their hair, their clothing, their shape, all of it mimics the magical girl near-perfectly, but artifice betrays them; they are frozen things, dead things, and their rainbow eyes lack the shine and glitter of the original article. 

Agatha hesitates, looking away from her unnerving imitations to squint up at the dolls’ mistress on her throne of twisted plastic. “Are you… narrating?”

I raise my hand to my chest and adopt a shocked expression. “Gasp! The wickedly seductive villainess is caught narrating her thoughts out loud in an evil monologue! Can she recover from this classic blunder?” I grin. “Count on it, viewers.”

This’ll actually be my third show fight under Visage. We’ve been working on a storyline to introduce Archon to the Visage audience and get the character settled among the complex dynamics of witches and magical girls. It was my suggestion that Archon’s first rival should be Agatha Cain, which Agatha agreed to readily.

Visage hadn’t found a stable pairing for Agatha yet, so they’d been rotating her between a few of the witches with less on their plate. I intruded on a feud between Agatha and Sweet Tooth, fought to a draw with the candy witch, and played up the start of an obsession with the heroine detective. Next was an ambush, securing a cheap win against Agatha under the guise of testing her measure.

This encounter is the payoff, the solidification of our rivalry. Visage rented out a museum wing that’s between exhibits—everything valuable tucked away in storage, waiting for bureaucracy to sign off on the new layout—to lend our fight some gravitas. I know my part, and Agatha knows hers, so all that’s left is to play.

I snap my fingers and the two dolls nearest to Agatha explode. Red ribbons emerge from the dolls like entrails, their plastic shells clattering discarded to the ground. The ribbons coil around the magical girl faster than she can react, encircling her with serpentine grace. They bind her wrists and ankles and suspend her from hidden anchor points above. It’s quite a good look for her, though acknowledging that out loud would ruin any plausible deniability about my motives for tying her up like this.

 Agatha struggles against her bindings while I prance over, smiling and waving to the camera drones that followed her in. The heroine shoots me a deadpan look. “An obnoxious riddle to lead me here, a pack of cheap copies, and now a cartoonish trap at the entrance to your lair. Something tells me you were born to play the villain of the week.”

“Gasp!” I say again. “I’ll have you know these copies are of the highest quality. They’re built on your official figure from the Visage store!” I conjure an Agatha figurine to my hand and show it off. “See? They got your hair just right.”

Agatha rolls her eyes. “How nice, a fan. What do you want… what was your name again, witch?” She’s throwing me a perfect opportunity to mug for the camera, how courteous.

I step back, stretch my wings, and bow deeply at just the right angle to give the camera drones a good shot of my cleavage. “I am Archon, the fallen angel of covetous desire. And I. Want. You.” I rise back up and hug myself amorously, leering at Agatha with the kind of unhinged desire I usually reserve for Striga. “I want magical girls, my darling detective. You’re all so virtuous and perfect and wonderful, a pack of incandescent flames that I need to make mine.”

I draw one of the dolls near to me with a curl of my finger, then caress its face, eliciting a shiver from Agatha. “And then what?” she asks, glaring at the doll. “Is that your ideal outcome?”

“Yes!” I pat the head of the Agatha doll, which is incapable of emoting in any way. “I want to capture the light inside every magical girl and turn you all into my perfect dolls. These puppets are lovely, they’re adorable, but they’re not the real deal. They’re missing that special spark. You’ll make a much, much better specimen.”

“You’re taking objectification to a whole new level,” Agatha says dryly. “I think it’s time I knocked that ego down to size.”

Agatha snaps her fingers and a spark of flame ignites in her hand, then jumps to the ribbons binding her. Her magic blazes through mine and frees her in an instant, and then it’s all about the violence.

Fighting Agatha is fun. We’re both holding back, but that adds a fascinating element of play to our scripted encounter. She flings fire and lightning in a way that’s easy for me to dodge, I shoot foam arrows that she knows to freeze before they hit her. I pop open another doll, she burns the ribbons before they can snare her. It has to look exciting for the viewers, but landing bloody hits is actually discouraged; a lot of streaming sites come down hard on depiction of real injury. We make good use of the space I’ve prepared, dancing around the half-empty hall before ending up at my makeshift throne.

“Magnificent,” I praise Agatha from my perch. “You’ll make an exquisite doll.”

“Keep dreaming,” she says from below, and then she prepares a massive volley of fire, ice, and lightning, dozens of spells all pointed at me.

I conjure a flashbang from Ferromancer, smile for the camera, and set it off. My maniacal laughter fills the room and echoes as I escape, leaving behind a pulverized throne where Agatha’s spells went off. The heroine curses and swears vengeance, which I hear clearly from just around the corner, and then the lights on the camera drones change to indicate that they’ve stopped filming.

I pop back around the corner and wave. “So! How was it? Good banter? I wasn’t too intense, was I?”

Agatha, still rubbing her eyes, laughs at my questions. “You were fine. I mean, it was a little creepy to be on the receiving end of that, but I just have to remind myself it’s all part of the game. I think the fans will eat it up, and that’s what really matters.”

“Great! Then, lunch? I’ll text Bombshell.”

We leave the Riley Biers Museum of Cultural Significance behind, transform into our civilian personas, and meet Bombshell—as Hannah, her own civilian identity—outside the sushi place I picked out. It’s a nice place, all wood and stone, with great mood lighting. The soft patter of rain outside adds to the ambience. I made a reservation for three, so we’re swiftly ushered to a private room to deliberate on our food choices.

The best way to eat sushi is to get a bunch of different varieties and pick at them as a group. Money isn’t really an object for us, so we go down the list: avocado and cucumber, blue crab, lobster, salmon sashimi, chicken karaage, shrimp tempura, and so on. Hannah and I order cocktails, while Eleanor—Agatha’s civilian name, as I learned for the first time last week—spends most of her time researching the differences between types of sake. She settles on the “Little Lily” drink, apparently the sweetest thing on the menu.

“It’s unfair how good you still look out of costume,” I accuse Hannah. “I am a troglodyte sitting next to you.”

The perpetually gorgeous Bombshell giggles at my compliment. “Hard work and practice is all it takes. If you want to, like, up your game or whatever, you could always start wearing some of those outfits I was suggesting last time! You’d look suuuuper cute!”

“Not happening.” I take another sip of my cocktail and muse, “I might take inspiration for a future work costume, though. Chat loves T&A.”

Eleanor snorts. “You’ve really taken to that side of things. I’m still not sure how I feel about that. I said it as a joke in the scene, but it is kind of objectifying, isn’t it?”

I shrug. “Isn’t that the point? We’re products. Sure, we have to keep up a layer of plausible deniability, gotta play to that Madonna-whore complex, but the merch team knows what they’re doing. Marketing knows what it’s doing. The viewers know what they’re watching for. I mean, not all of them, sure, but enough of them.”

“Sex sells!” Hannah adds cheerfully before snapping up a tuna roll.

Eleanor sighs. “I guess. I hope that’s not why most of my followers are watching. I mean, I can’t imagine I’m that… appealing, I guess.”

Hannah swallows her food and points a chopstick at Eleanor. “Everything is appeal. Cute, shy, nerdy, that’s an archetype! Glasses are a fetish! Girl, there is nothing you can do to escape being someone’s sexual fantasy, so don’t worry about it. Guy clicks on your page because gothic lolita makes him horny. Guy stays on your page because your personality is entertaining and you’re fun to be around. That’s how it is!”

I chew on some sashimi and ruminate. Venus had a hand in crafting Visage, of that I’m certain, but all the structures of Visage were in place long before her. She’s taking advantage of cultural patterns that already existed, etched into society by the weight of centuries. If you can’t beat them, join them. Is that Bombshell’s philosophy? You can’t escape the game, so learn to play and win?

She certainly seems more comfortable with that way of thinking than Agatha, despite having left Visage while Agatha still participates. But then again, Agatha’s position is very different from Bombshell’s.

Eleanor drinks more rice wine. “You make it sound so simple,” she chuckles. “I guess I should be more used to this than I am, but I’ve always been a little sheltered.”

“Why’d you join up, anyway?” Hannah asks.

“I needed the money. Playing vigilante doesn’t pay off college loans, and I’ve been able to help my parents and some of my friends with medical bills and the like. I don’t regret it. Most of the time, I actually think this job is pretty fun, if stressful. I just… feel weird about it. Sometimes I feel like I should have joined Vanguard. There’s this sense of guilt I can’t escape. Great power, great responsibility, right?”

Hannah laughs. “Oh my god, you have an adorable conscience. This is why you got tapped to be a magical girl and not a witch.”

Eleanor blushes. “I—you say that like it’s embarrassing.”

The witch waves a hand. “Sorry, sorry, it really is cute! Listen, sweetie, there’s nothing wrong with getting your bag and moving on. Work the gig until you’ve got your nest egg, then go off and do, like, whatever it is you’re really passionate about! That’s what I did.”

I chime in with, “Yeah, I don’t think you need to feel guilty about paying your bills, especially with what you said about using that money to help others. If that’s what you wanna do, pay it all off and then bounce. Though, personally, I’d be sad to see you go. I like your streams, and I’m really looking forward to playing off you in the future.”

The heroine’s blush deepens. “Aww, thank you, A—Rachel. That means a lot.” She buries further embarrassment in avocado and cucumber.

Hannah turns her gaze on me with an appraising look. “Sooo what’s the scoop on you? Settling in well?”

I grin. “Oh, absolutely. Love the role, love the attention, love it all.” I actually have my phone out, idly scrolling through social media channels for any posts tagged with my persona. “The money is nice and it’s good to eat good food, but I mostly buy merch to put in the studio or gacha rolls that I stream pulling, so it all kinda pays for itself. I just like the thrill of everyone paying attention to me.”

Hannah clicks her tongue. “And yet you won’t get in the miniskirt?”

“I’m only an exhibitionist when people can’t see my real face!” I protest.

After another round of banter, laughter, and idle chatter, I start working toward the heart of why I wanted to have this little get-together. Striga and Ferromancer’s assessment of Bombshell is that she’s not bound to any of our enemies, but neither would she care about our war; her motivations are too hedonistic to make her a useful asset to the conspiracy as anything but a weapon. Necessary when Echidna arrives—and I’ve heard Bombshell spoiling for that fight plenty of times in the past month—but not until then. I’m hoping I can get more out of her.

“So,” I start, finishing a plate of karaage and washing it down with the last of my second cocktail. “I may or may not have had an ulterior motive in setting this up. To cut to the chase, I was hoping you could help us out, as a favor. Agatha and I have been stuck to each other because we’re both newbies; we’re the new kids that have to prove ourselves to the trio on top. I’ve watched their streams, I’ve read their interviews, but you worked with them. So… what’s the deal with the big three? Pearl Princess, Radiance, Memento. What are they really like, and how can we get them on our side?”

Bombshell leans back in her chair, a look of mischief on her face. “Why, Archon, are you asking me to divulge the secrets of Visage? Gosh, I don’t know. That kind of information might cost you dearly. Are you sure you wanna pay that price?”

I steel myself. “Name it, wench.”

She giggles and leans forward. “Hair. Makeup. Outfit. I pick ‘em all. And then we go out, girls’ night on the town.”

“Scoundrel. Knave. Ne’er-do-well. The pact is struck, fiend.”

She claps her hands happily. “Yay! Oh my god, we’re going to have so much fun, it’s going to be great, you have no idea. Agatha, you’re coming too, right?”

The heroine freezes up like a deer in headlights. “Me? I. Um. I mean. Uh. I don’t really… do that? Kind of thing? Ever?”

“Great! You’ll learn so much! Of course, you don’t have to, if you really don’t want to.” Bombshell pouts at Agatha with S-tier puppy-dog eyes, a performance that’s overwrought even for her, but which proves super effective against poor Agatha.

“Oh, fine.” Agatha sags in her seat. “Learning experience. Right.”

The witch cackles. “Perfect! Okay, okay, you bought your intel fair and square. Here’s the scoop: all three of them care about profit and branding, sure, but they’ve got specialties. Memento is the money gal, she’s the type to stay up late going over profit margin spreadsheets and call down the thunder on anyone trying to cheat the company. Radiance is all about reach and networking, she wants to expand Visage’s market as wide as possible and burrow into every possible niche. Pearl Princess is the most image-conscious of the three, she’s the one who really buys into the ideals of idol culture, the one who’ll raise the biggest fuss if you threaten the respectability of the organization. Profit, reach, and image, that’s what you need to cultivate if you want to impress upper management.”

“I still think I’d be better off just keeping my head down,” Agatha mutters. This is part of the script; it’s not in-character for Agatha to play the social climber, so we’re framing it as me pushing her into it. I don’t know if Bombshell really cares about our motives, but this is for the benefit of any Jovians that might be watching us.

I nudge Agatha’s shoulder and give her a grin. “It’ll be fine. The faster you can rise through the ranks, the easier it’ll be for you to cash out and run off to Vanguard, yeah? Just like Bombshell said.”

The witch eyes me with amusement. “And what’s your endgame, cutie?”

I wink at her. “Isn’t it obvious? I want to be the new face of Visage.”

[commentary]

I’m excited to play with this stuff. Genuinely very happy about writing weird parasocial stuff.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

[commentary]

HEY! Do you know what came out yesterday? HUNGRY’S NEW WEB SERIAL!

That’s right, the author of Katalepsis and Necroepilogos has begun a new project, and this one is about MAGICAL GIRLS! Magical girl cosmic horror! Magical girl sapphic yearning! If you’re still reading TMGM, this should be exactly your jam, so go check out Maidens of the Fall!

[/commentary]

The inner Spire stands tall at the center of the park. Like the real Tower, it’s the singular highlight of a commercial cul-de-sac, surrounded by businesses gleeful to squat in its shadow, but that similarity is an illusion. The restaurants and cafes are just facades, their doors and windows painted on. The fountain’s contents are sculpted glass rather than water. It’s all a lie.

Up close, the Spire glows with multicolored light just like the one we’re technically inside, a sign of resonant energy being absorbed from the World of Glass and transferred somewhere else. The doors to this Spire are crossed with another set of golden chains.

Howl examines the ward with a frown. “I don’t think I can really tell the difference between Hastur’s work and something Venus built, so no clues there. Agatha?”

The magical girl fidgets with her glasses. “All the threads were leading here, but I think if I tried to take a look now I’d throw up again. Up close, this much density… it would be bad.”

“Nothing for it!” I say cheerfully, and then I knock.

My fist bounces off a wall of golden energy that flashes visible for only a brief moment. The sensation is tingly rather than painful, though I still rub my hand gingerly and glare at the barrier in mock outrage. Howl rolls her eyes at my antics.

“Rude,” I mutter at the door.

Up above, the sound of creaking and grinding echoes. The entity within the bundled tent-cloth writhes and shifts, a myriad of half-seen shapes pressing against the surface of its fragile prison. A vast metal hand tears through the fabric, ripping open a great gash that the rest of its body follows through, and it’s…

It’s a giant Yokohime Rin. It’s another animatronic mascot, pink and frilly and anime-faced, only ten times the size.

The giant robot crashes down on the other side of the cul-de-sac, by the entrance, its weight shattering the cobblestone street. Then it strikes a cutesy pose and throws up double peace signs.

“Did you know?” its bubbly voice rings out. “This boss fight is sponsored by Betty Crocker, your number one source for cake mix! Try our affiliate flavor, ‘Mahou Shoujo Sprinkle Surprise!’ Just like mom used to make!”

Howl twitches. “I hate it. Why couldn’t it have been another fucked up angel?”

“It’s kind of charming,” I muse. “Horrible, but charming.”

Agatha taps her chin. “There’s an interesting implication to this choice of enemy. Venus is clearly trying to convey some sort of message, but what?”

“Okay!” the robot says. “Time for violence!”

Its eyes flash, twin laser beams sweep across the courtyard, and we scatter.

Agatha shapes ice barriers to pen the giant in, Howl takes aim for its eyes, and I start summoning. I’ve been working on a new type of familiar—something that, like the deimovore imitations, are never going to get used in my public persona as a Visage witch—and this will be their first live combat trial.

I call the schematics to mind, pour forth flame, and conjure my first wave of cyberdemons. Fusions of infernal flesh and advanced machinery, I’ve augmented my original familiars with Ferromancer’s technology to create delightful abominations that straddle the line between Doom monsters (hence the name) and the Phyrexians from Magic: the Gathering.

Despite the tension that grew between us after my first foray into the World of Glass, I still appreciate having Ferromancer as my mentor. With my importance to the conspiracy justifying extra expenditures, I’ve been allowed to feed dozens of Ferromancer’s inventions to my furnace. And, as it was fed, something about it has grown; my quantity of flame isn’t greater, exactly, but my budget for complexity is higher. Advanced designs have become simpler for Prometheus to recreate, and that allows me to produce in numbers the kinds of familiars that would have taken most of my flame just a month ago.

Each scaled, horned, fire-blooded demon is equipped with cybernetic eyes for targeting, jet boosters welded to the spine for limited bursts of flight, and a plasma cannon in the place of its left hand. With a mental command—and on certain preprogrammed triggers—the cannon will drain power from the rest of the demon’s systems to explode violently.

My cyberdemons spread out around the courtyard and start blasting the giant robot. Plasma melts and warps its metallic skin, but the animatronic cheers, “Wow! That tickles! Look how much fun we’re having together!” It pounds its fists against one of Agatha’s ice walls while lasering through a few of my minions and laughing off all their attacks.

Howl’s arrows, likewise, have been denting the surface of the mechanical Rin without managing to puncture. The other witch draws her swords instead and bounds over to the edge of the courtyard, then runs along the wall to get over the ice barrier and take a lunging jump at the robot.

The animatronic swings at her with its hand, but Howl flickers in and out of existence, reappearing just past the arc of the attack. She lands on the giant Rin’s arm and runs up it, leaps again, and jabs both blades into one of its glowing eyes before the laser can fire again. The glow coming off that eye intensifies and bursts, melting the side of the animatronic’s face and sending Howl falling away.

“Gee, Howl, we’d sure love to have you!” the robot says. “That’s the moxie we need here at Visage! What’s your price?”

Agatha hits it next. While Howl and my minions have been distracting the robot, Agatha’s been preparing one of her spells: a supercharged bolt of lightning that crashes into the machine and forks up and down its body, splitting apart into dozens and then hundreds of smaller strands of electricity that pass through the robot and ground out at its feet.

“N-n-nice shot, Agatha!” Rin praises, voice distorted and body twitching. “You’re getting a C-C-Christmas bonus for sure!”

Misshapen and groaning, the robot still manages to pummel its way through the ice wall and step through it—only to immediately slip and fall on the ice slick that Agatha weaves from the shards of the broken barrier. I direct my remaining cyberdemons to self-destruct on its leg so it’ll have a hard time getting up, then swoop over to Agatha.

“Another combo kill?” I offer. “For style points? I bet it’ll work on this thing better than it did on Delilah.”

Agatha grins. “Let’s do it.”

“Then I’ll keep it busy,” Howl says, appearing beside us in a flicker before leaping back toward the fallen giant. Despite her cool tone, the corners of her lips are curled in a half-smile.

The animatronic’s remaining eye flares up for a laser beam too slowly to stop Howl from gouging it out like the first, and this time Howl’s already moving again before the blast can hit her. While Howl dashes around hacking at the robot’s limbs whenever it tries to rise—dodging its lumbering counterattacks with ease—I pump flame into Agatha’s book. Is it overkill? Almost certainly; this boss is basically already beaten. But, just in case it has another trick up its sleeve, we’re going to blast those sleeves to smithereens.

And, hey, Venus seems like the type to appreciate a more stylish win.

“Uh oh!” the Rin bot says pleasantly. “Th-th-that looks like a big one! Redirecting power to shields. VisageCorp apologizes for any disruption in park service.”

The rest of the park dims—every visible light darkening, the background glow of light pollution muting—as a thin layer of golden energy appears around the oversized animatronic. Howl backs off, joining us by the doors to the Spire, as I finish empowering Agatha’s weapon—it takes less out of me this time, though I’m still left shivering—and she unleashes her ultimate attack on our opponent.

“With clear eyes, I see the path before me. Henceforth, I shall suffer no sacrifice. THREADS OF DESTINY!”

As before, Agatha’s glowing spellbook explodes into pages that unravel into threads which completely fill the area, every one of them passing through the form of the animatronic. A thousand swords of perfect white light appear midair and are flung, striking the golden shield, cracking it, and then piercing through to impale Yokohime Rin.

The swords fade, my flame rushes back to me, and the wreckage of the giant robot slumps in place. As the light leaves its eyes, the corporate mascot creaks out one final message, voice stuttering and warping.

“Th-th-this… pay-per-view event… d-d-dedicated to… the victims of the T-T-Texas Incident. Thoughts… and… p-p-prayers.”

There’s a beat of silence while I gather my strength. Then, with a grin at Howl and Agatha, I say, “Well, it’s what Texas would have wanted.”

Howl swats me on the head. Agatha looks mortified, but she’s also hiding a giggle behind her hand. “Awful,” the magical girl accuses me.

“I am a villain,” I tease. “It’s my job.”

Howl waves a hand. “Yeah, yeah. Let’s get back to the others and report.”

“Sooooo yeah! Felt like a freebie. We wanted something to fight after the weirdly chill theme park level, so Venus gave us a mascot to push around.” I chew on my lip and hum. “Whatever her overall strategy is, it seems like she really wants to, I don’t know, rebuild her position? We’re all super poisoned against her after that first trip, so this is her chance to reset that impression.”

We take turns explaining our adventure to Striga, who listens to everything with that customary mask of cold, expressionless patience. When I finish my part, Striga nods. “She’s cultivating experiences as a form of negotiation. The ‘threat’ wasn’t threatening, but its nature made it satisfying to destroy. Venus is trying to present herself as harmless at worst and desirable at best. Allowing her to continue that strategy may bait out some of her true intentions, but it goes without saying that you should not allow yourselves to grow complacent around her.”

“I doubt that’s a live worry,” Howl chuckles. “The old bitch isn’t exactly endearing herself to us with stunts like those.”

“You should worry,” Striga says sharply. “She will do everything in her power to lower your guard before she strikes. Practice vigilance. Do not assume safety to her tricks.”

Howl grumbles. Agatha swallows nervously, then nods and says, “Yes, ma’am.”

“I must also comment on your decision to engage the guardian alone,” the heroine continues, turning her icy gaze on me.

I sit up and lean forward, preening, eager for my beloved’s precious attentions. Is she going to praise me or scold me? The sugary sweetness of reward or the burning spice of punishment? Maintaining my loyalty is important to her goals, but she might consider it more valuable here to reinforce a sense of discipline.

“I commend your teamwork and your ultimate victory, and I recognize that this is not a military organization; many, many decisions will be made in the field by consensus agreement rather than the orders of your appointed team leader. However, the initiative you took in this instance has denied me the chance to observe the guardian’s actions up close, and it denied Ferromancer the chance to try and interfere with the machine’s systems. These may end up being small opportunity costs, but they are present, and they should have been considered.”

Ah, the fusion of flavors! What a perfect treat. I allow myself to shine with glee at her initial compliment, then temper that with pouting regret as she proceeds into her criticism. “Of course,” I say with contrition. “I’ll be more mindful of that in the future.” And I will, because it’s what she wants, and I’ll do anything for my beloved. Everything.

With that settled, we turn to other matters. The whole conspiracy is assembled in one of the Ossuary’s meeting rooms, a rather modern-looking space with cushy office chairs, a long table, and digital screens that Striga controls with a sleek laptop. We’re seated haphazardly, with Striga at the head of the table and everyone else to either side. The Morrigan is present through one of her skeletal servants, waiting patiently just beside Striga.

Herbalist, the newest addition to our conspiracy, clears her throat and stands to deliver her briefing. Vanguard’s top sorceress, and a visual mirror to the Coterie’s; dark-skinned instead of pale, dressed conservatively in flowing robes with a satchel around her waist. “I’ve been working on the issue of Jupiter. The seal that binds him is complex, but not, I believe, beyond our abilities in conjunction. The Morrigan has been of significant aid in devising our ‘patch’ to the seal, but to build something that can survive the fall of Venus or Mars, let alone both, we will need more talent brought on to the project. I would recommend Lilith, obviously. If their loyalties could be ascertained, Radiance and Memento both have a lot to offer the project.”

As Herbalist returns to her seat, the skeleton clatters its jaw and the Morrigan’s lyrical voice issues from it. “I am preparing the framework for a stable portal between the Ossuary and the outskirts of the pit, which will be a necessary step before any sorcery is woven. Once that is complete, we may consider reaching out to others.”

Howl points at Striga. “Hey, ‘Champion of Minerva,’ got any global connections we can tap for that? Seems like our highest priority.”

Strix Striga shakes her head. “They’re all working on their own projects, engaged in local counterparts to our own conflicts. From our perspective, this is obviously the most important front in the war, but that doesn’t mean those other fronts are completely unimportant—and there is always the chance that this is the decoy. Howl, how goes your hunt for Echidna?”

Echidna, Queen of Beasts, is one of the Catastrophes—the apocalyptically dangerous witches empowered by the Jovians to serve as conduits for Jupiter, the god of disaster. One of her monstrous creations attacked Forks back in October, but little of her has been seen since.

“She’s a wily bastard,” Howl admits, leaning back in her chair. “Very practiced at laying false trails. I’ve explored three of her hideouts in the past month, all of them filled with traps and monsters. I don’t think any of them were her real base.”

Striga taps a button on her laptop and the screens around the room light up with photographs of devastation and maps of North America. “Her behavior has been consistent with the model she displayed in her attacks on Ottawa, Atlanta, and Phoenix. In each case, she spent several months building up her resources—abducting locals to use as biological material for her familiars—with intermittent sacrifice of pawns to probe the city’s defenses or mislead her pursuers. We can expect her to continue entrenching and obfuscating at her current rate for another four months, then two months of acceleration before the attack. Due to the damage this will cause to the civilian population of the region, locating Echidna’s true lair before she has finished preparations is currently Vanguard’s highest priority. With our knowledge of the true purpose of the Catastrophes and their role in the Jovian agenda, defeating Echidna is also my highest priority. Unfortunately, Vanguard has failed to elicit cooperation from the Coterie.”

Agatha frowns. “Aren’t they required to assist, according to the compact?”

I wiggle my fingers in a so-so gesture. “Not exactly. Once the attack is imminent, yeah, but until then it’s up to them.”

Harlequin pops up with an elaborate bow. “Indeed, indeed! We are, alas, fraught with factions. Visage and Syndicate alike have been pressuring our people, rummaging rudely through our ranks with the real risk of recruitment. Pressure creates pressure, and so our eminent leaders have chosen to prioritize the goals of the organization over our truce with Vanguard. Until terms force their hand, expect only stone.”

Striga doesn’t betray her dissatisfaction outside an infinitesimal tightening of her mouth. “A predictable response. The Syndicate are preparing for a larger operation, but I am less certain of what Visage intends. This could be their typical growth mindset, but we understand very little of what Venus is planning.” Her attention flicks to me again and I glow with warmth, basking in her gaze. “Discerning her strategy is imperative. Foiling her plans may be vital to securing the Coterie’s support.”

“On that note,” Ferromancer drawls, “I’ll start setting up my engine inside the Spire. Access to the first two levels should give me a whole lot more data to work with than if we were still waiting on the second, so for my part I’ll thank our trigger-happy expedition.”

The witch winks at me, which draws a half second of lingering attention from Striga before the heroine claps her hands together and says, “Well, I believe that’s everything. You all know your responsibilities, and how to contact each other through the Ossuary. We’ll meet again in January. Thank you for your continued service to the salvation of our species.”

[commentary]

Blah blah survival of the species blah blah when are they gonna FUCK???? What am I paying for????

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

“We shouldn’t stay here long,” Howl says after we bring her up to speed. “With the shifters, we aren’t on a strict timetable like the Halloween mission. You opened the tower, it should be trivial to get back in later, so let’s just run a quick sweep and then return to the others for debrief.”

I sketch a mock salute. “Yes, boss!”

Howl shoots me an unimpressed look, but there’s less genuine annoyance than there would have been a month ago; I’m wearing her down, bit by funny bit.

“Honestly,” Agatha says, “leaving here will be a relief. This place gives me the creeps.”

Venus vanished while we were opening the door for Howl, and aside from her, we haven’t seen another soul. The park is full of cheering and chattering at the edge of hearing—an indistinct murmur of conversation that never clarifies into comprehensible speech—but there are no people. No one riding the coasters, no one stepping in or out of shops, no one at all in the whole area.

Animatronic magical girls are spaced throughout Venusland, each offering cheerful propaganda whenever someone makes the mistake of stepping into range of their motion sensors. At least none of these are real people; they’re all modeled after the Visage mascot, Yokohime Rin, a 3D rig and voice bank created to salvage all of the work done on virtual idols that the appearance of real magical girls overshadowed. She’s the ideal image of a magical girl, dressed in a pink uniform that combines aesthetic elements of Sailor Moon, Madoka Magica, and Cardcaptor Sakura.

“Did you know?” a Rin animatronic chirps, high-pitched and energetic. “Studies suggest that watching Visage broadcasts can increase your happiness levels by up to sixty-three percent! Our fans report feeling more confident and less lonely after participating in stream chat, hearing their donation messages read out, or joining an online community of fellow fans. Find your oshi today and let them know you’re watching!”

“Did you know?” chirps another. “Visage is responsible for creating thousands of jobs in Forks, Washington, and tens of thousands worldwide! We’re always looking for more hard-working, dedicated fans to make our dream a reality. Contact your local office to see how you can help our magical girls really shine!”

“Did you know? Our merch store runs a sale on the 1st of every month! Don’t shop less, shop smart. If you can’t normally afford that shirt or mousepad you really want, save up and wait for the 1st!”

“Did you know? Watching a stream with someone is a great bonding activity! Invite your friends and share your oshi!”

“Did you know? The Starlight Ruby Warriors anime is coming soon!”

“Did you know? There are tours of the Spire every day!”

“Did you know? Did you know? Did you know?”

The novelty of seeing an animatronic Rin gets old pretty quick.

We wander around the park for a while. Agatha and I are tempted by the delicious-smelling churro stand, but its scrumptious treasures are denied us by Howl’s withering stare of disapproval. We don’t go on any rides, either, though I spend a lot of time wondering what could be inside the Dusk & Dawn Tunnel of Close Sisterly Intimacy. We can’t fly in here, of course, same as it was in Glass Forks.

The Spire is an obvious destination, but it’s one we avoid; getting close will probably trigger the boss fight, and Howl wants us at full complement for that. Privately, I think the three of us could take it. Agatha and I have really upped our game since the last expedition, and I want to put my new toys to the test.

Despite the eerie lack of people and the annoying animatronics, there’s something almost relaxing about this strange, empty theme park. I feel so at home in liminal spaces, though Howl and Agatha don’t seem to share my contentment. Agatha’s been working on her confidence, but she still glances around nervously at each corner and alleyway as we pass through the park. Howl just looks annoyed, which I guess is kind of her default state.

“I haven’t been to an amusement park since I was a kid,” I say to lighten the mood. “My parents took me to a water park in the summer, but I hated swimming, so I was miserable the whole trip, which got them yelling at me for being ungrateful. The hot dogs afterward were nice, at least.”

“Eh, you’re not missing much,” says Howl with a shrug. “They’re tacky, overpriced, and full of people.”

Agatha looks at me with concern. “Was that how your parents normally treated you?”

I wave a hand dismissively. “You know how it is. Nobody really gets along with their parents, that’s why you work so hard to get a scholarship so you can fuck off to college and move out.”

“I get along with my parents just fine,” Agatha protests. “We go out for lunch every month to catch up. They even know I’m a magical girl. Your parents should be your first friends.”

Howl snorts. “Hell no. Parents are for twice-yearly calls that you sit through to stay in the will, awkward holiday dinners, and introducing them to partners you know they’ll like so that they offer to pay for dates at fancy restaurants.”

“That’s terribly cynical,” Agatha says. “Mercenary, even. Is that how you treat all your relationships?” There’s a teasing tone to her voice that makes me wonder how much of Howl’s past the two of them have discussed in their private training sessions.

We banter for a bit longer before Howl calls us to a stop outside Club Vivarium. I had an inkling from the name alone, but up close it’s obvious that this place is a rip-off of the Ossuary. The wide entrance to the brick structure is an archway of vines and flowers around a swirling white void, and a sign out front promises that the Visage girls are regularly available for meet-and-greets inside.

“Agatha, see anything different?” Howl asks.

The magical girl takes off her glasses and immediately squints against the chaotic mess of threads visible only to her. Her expression grows queasy, but she powers through and studies her surroundings intently. After a minute, she says, “No, it’s the same as everywhere else in this place. Visual noise, the only clear connections leading back to the tower in the middle.”

“It’s a layered dungeon,” I speculate. “We beat the guardian outside, then met the condition to get into the first floor, where we found another Spire and another guardian. I’d bet money next floor isn’t the last—there’ll be at least three levels, probably more—and I doubt anything of importance is going to be waiting for us on the outermost layer. This might be our shop level, our safe area, with only future floors having regular encounters.”

Howl sighs. “I hate that video games might actually be a relevant pull here.”

“We know Hastur fed her kids on a diet of Earth media,” I say with a grin. “Kind of amusing to imagine Mars and Venus fighting over the Xbox controller.”

“There’s another interpretation of this level,” Agatha muses, accepting my video game framing. “Venus is trying to indoctrinate us, right? She said at the gate that she wants to bring us around to her point of view. If that’s the goal, why throw enemies at us at all? Maybe the Spire guardians will be the only real danger on any floor—and that’s assuming the guardian here will be a fight and not some kind of puzzle or non-combat trial.”

“Concerns for our future expeditions,” Howl says firmly. “Ferromancer can analyze the energy flow to see if anything here is responsible, and I’m sure Striga will find something interesting about this place. I think we’re about done here, but I’m going to do one more lap of the park to see what my own sight gets me. Back in a few minutes.”

We nod our acceptance and Howl hops on the back of her wolf, which grows in size to make a better mount, before racing off into the distance.

“Well,” I say, “no point in standing around. Peckish?”

Agatha gives me a wry look. “A little, but what are the odds that the food here is poisoned or enchanted? Howl didn’t seem fond of us eyeing that churro cart.”

“The odds aren’t zero,” I admit, “but c’mon, if Howl could tell something actually wrong with the food she would have said that instead of just glaring, which, let’s be honest, is most of what her face does anyway. And those churros, though.”

“I’d do unspeakable things for a good churro.” Agatha sighs dreamily. “I haven’t had one in forever.”

“Game theory: if Venus is trying to use this place to convert us, outright mind control is actually counterproductive. Sure, she might win the lotto and actually nab someone, but there’s no way she gets us all—you saw how Howl is treating this place—and the inevitable result would be the afflicted getting freed and never, ever trusting Venus again. If she wants us to accept any of her offers, she has to play fair until the very last moment.”

“Okay, fine, you’ve convinced me.” Agatha sticks her tongue out, eyes twinkling, and we go looking for food.

The churros are, in fact, delicious. It’s amazing how much you can do with fried dough and cinnamon sugar. I don’t suddenly start fawning over Venus after devouring my three, so that’s a point in the “not mind control” camp.

Agatha seems to be enjoying them even more than me, with the look on her face best described as rapturous bliss. “God, these are just as good as I remembered. There has to be a churro place in Forks, right?”

“Almost certainly. If not, Seattle’s a short flight.” Less than an hour at my top speed, though I don’t know Agatha’s. “So, wrapping back to our earlier conversation, I’m going to guess you’ve been to a theme park or two?”

Agatha nods. “Oh yeah, I used to go down to Legoland every year with my folks. It was a big event. Another family paid for us—they were close friends of my parents, former coworkers that went into higher business—and we paid for a couple of my friends whose parents didn’t have the money for it. Flew down to the one in California, played minigolf, ate the churros, and, of course, built Legos. I was never much for the rides, honestly, but I loved Lego when I was a kid. I always wanted to see what cool new builds I could put together from different sets, and at one point I was dreaming of designing my own product line.” She blushes. “That was, um, a little overly ambitious for a nine-year-old.”

“Bet you could do it now, and on Visage money.” I grin at her startled expression. “I mean, they love that shit, right? Crossovers, tie-ins, the works. One conversation with Memento and you could be on call with a Lego representative gushing about how much you love their product. They’d totally let you be the creative consultant on making a Visage set.”

Agatha stares off into space, starry-eyed and biting her lip. “I… I don’t know. That sounds too good to be true, and I’d hate to get worked up for it and then be disappointed.”

“I’m surprised you’ve never done a chill building stream. Do you not collect anymore?”

“Oh, I do,” she answers immediately and enthusiastically. “This job has made it so, so much easier to keep up with releases. I guess, well… I’ve thought about it, but I worry I’ve pigeonholed myself too much as the ‘mystery solver girl.’ I’m still the new kid on the block in Visage, at least on my side of the aisle, and I don’t want to give the higher ups any reason to criticize me.” She grimaces, then shakes her head. “Enough about me, what about you? How have you been adapting to the idol life?”

“Well, you know, it has its ups and downs.” I pause for a beat, then grin from ear to ear. “It’s fuckin’ awesome, I love it, oh my god the rush. People give me tens and hundreds just to hear me read out their dumb usernames. I’ve got one guy who keeps trying to get me with ‘deez nuts’ jokes, that’s a gold mine. The attention is a drug, and I would know.”

Agatha laughs. “Oh, man, you’re taking to it way better than I did. I… well, I became a magical girl for some very silly reasons. I wanted to be like my favorite book character. But, it was all just… too mundane. I could roleplay a detective, sure, but what good was I really doing that other people weren’t way, way more qualified for? There weren’t any grand eldritch conspiracies to unravel—that I knew of—and I wanted to pay off my college loans and make life a little easier for my friends and family, so… Visage!”

“And then all of this.”

“And then this,” Agatha agrees. “When Lady Striga approached me, I was beyond honored, but more than that I felt like finally I had a chance to be a hero like the girl I took my name from.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Agatha? I always thought that was an Agatha Christie reference.”

“Oh, it is! It’s the, um, surname that I was talking about.” Agatha’s cheeks redden again, but there’s a strange trace of pride in her voice as she says, “‘Cain,’ from Valkyrie Cain, the protagonist of an urban fantasy series I was obsessed with as a kid, and a teen, and honestly even now. She gets magic powers, fights evil gods, and solves mysteries. I wanted to be her. I guess I still do. Sorry, I know that’s such a lame reason.”

I burst out laughing. Agatha blushes deeper, and she looks like she’s about to say something when I finally gain control of myself and get out, “No, no, not laughing at you. At myself. Much, much stupider reason. Promise. Can’t tell you, sorry. Opsec. But trust me, your motivation is downright saintly in comparison to mine. I mean, I am a witch. Team Evil recruited me for a reason, even if they totally missed the mark on where my real loyalties lie. Seriously, Aggie, that’s great. You’re living every kid’s dream.”

She smiles softly. “Thanks. I hope I’m worthy of it.”

“Bah. Fuck being worthy, do it anyway.”

I straighten up in time to see Howl coming around the corner on her wolf. The other witch dismounts in front of us with a bored expression on her face.

“It’s a bust. Let’s get out of here.”

A wave of disappointment washes over me. We’re leaving already? But I haven’t gotten to kill anything! My new toys! I raise my hand, flash a cocksure grin, and say, “Okay, I hear you, but consider: what if we went and fought the floor guardian?”

Howl blinks at me slowly. “Do I even need to say it?” Agatha throws me a considering look, but doesn’t interject.

I roll my eyes. “Oh, come on. Agatha and I are way stronger than we were a month ago. We’ve been training! Plus, the thing outside was clearly Hastur’s pet, and this domain feels strictly Venus. I bet this one’s weaker, like when you fight a boss and then it becomes a regular enemy in future zones.”

Agatha suppresses a giggle. “I mean, that does happen.”

“You already acquiesced that video game logic is relevant here,” I point out. “Plus, if we can clear the boss now and unlock the second layer, it’ll mean even more data for the others to gather when we come back with the full team. It’s efficient!”

“Less efficient than hitting it with double the numbers,” Howl grumbles, but she’s not shutting me down completely.

“C’mon,” I cajole, “you want a fight, too, I know you do. Let’s hunt something together, Howl. Let’s take a risk and get our beaks wet.”

She throws up her hands. “Ugh, fine! But if this goes wrong, I’m not bailing you out.”

I give her a smug look back. “Of course not. I’m the one with the infinite supply of shifters. I’ll be bailing you out.”

Time to test my new toys. My beautiful, beautiful toys.

[commentary]

Have you ever been to Legoland? I’m not kidding about the churros. They’re fantastic.

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]

“Ready?”

Agatha nods. “I think so. I’ve been practicing a lot for this and I’ve gotten my record up to ten minutes. If that’s not enough time… well, there’ll be more windows.”

Ferromancer’s voice crackles over our hidden earpieces. “Camera blind is active and the nearest night guard is on the other side of the museum. Get to work, you two.”

In early November, I joined Visage as their newest partnered witch. The past month has been an absolute blur of public appearances around Forks, Twitch streams to build my online audience, and hobnobbing with other idols, but the real work has been investigating the Visage Spire. The version of the Spire that exists in the World of Glass is warded so heavily that not even Striga and the Morrigan were able to breach its defenses, and that’s a big problem.

Something within the alternate Spire is devouring all the conceptual energy generated by the people of Forks, and Howl’s scouting across North America confirmed that the absorption effect reaches all the way to the east coast, though its pull is weaker that far away. Finding the mechanism responsible and disabling it is my responsibility as a participant in Strix Striga’s secret war against Venus, Mars, and the Jovians who granted us all our powers.

Of course, Striga herself knows that “responsibility” is the furthest thing from my mind. Helping her is just a way to show my love. I was supposed to tell her my deeper feelings last Thanksgiving—the fact that I’m Rachel, that I know she’s Sophia, and that I’ve loved her since that night on the bridge in the rain—but we both ended up swamped with work and I couldn’t find a good opportunity to get her alone. Christmas, though. I’ll tell her on Christmas.

Finding an excuse to spend time in the Spire was easy; the lower floors are open to civilians, and being a good little earner for mommy Radiance—I think she’d kill me if I said that on stream—gets me fairly consistent access to the middle and upper floors. With Ferromancer taking advantage of her contract work with Visage to hack the Spire’s security systems, it should have been a simple matter of finding an empty room, summoning my plane shift device—which we nicknamed the shifter—and phasing over into the World of Glass.

“Okay, I see the link,” Agatha says with a wince, glasses tucked into her dress, holding out a shifter copy that I summoned for her. “This way.”

“Familiars on standby,” I say. “Ferro, tell me when I need to distract someone.”

Turns out, the wards block access even from within the realspace Spire—except, when we were puzzling over how to bypass that block, Agatha had something to reveal: since coming back from the World of Glass, her magic sight can now see those strange, impossibly-colored threads of connection in the real world. Some of those threads link to the shifter whenever I try to use it inside the Spire.

The trail of thread led us to the lower levels: a maze of lobbies, tourist traps, and gift shops. Specifically, Agatha’s investigation pointed us to the Visage Museum of Developing Culture and Magical Achievement, which is a very fancy name for a set of propaganda exhibits taking up an entire floor of the Spire. I’m a big fan of the souvenirs.

Agatha leads me through the wing of the museum dedicated to local history, every now and then stopping to massage her temples and blink away the stress of staring at colors that shouldn’t exist. I can’t really do anything for her, so I stay out of her way and glance over museum exhibits that I’ve already seen a dozen times before.

Plaques proudly highlight the influence of Dajani Multimedia Enterprises on the rise of Forks into a booming entertainment town, which—in conjunction with the Dajani heiress becoming a witch—led to DME making an aggressive bid on VisageCorp’s expansion into North America. Pearl Princess, Memento, and Radiance were all present at the raising of the Spire and form the management council that gets final verdict on inducting a new magical girl or witch into the ranks of VisageCorp NA. One or all of them, we suspect, are the direct pawns of Venus.

“Archon,” says Ferromancer over comms, “you’ve got a guard coming your way from the founders wing.”

“Roger.” I send a pulse of will to my minions and let them work their stuff.

For the purposes of infiltration, I’ve been developing another variety of familiar. The base design is actually inspired by the deimovore that tormented me in the World of Glass: a spidery horror with way too many legs. I’ve carefully incorporated gifts from Ferromancer and Herbalist—care of Striga—to grant the little fuckers active camouflage and voice mimicry, though it pales in comparison to the deimovore’s capabilities. Their main advantage as familiars is that they can conceptualize and execute complex tasks to fulfill vague directives, which costs so much flame that I can only field two of them before the cold seeps into my bones and I start suffering cognitive impairment. We’re working on that part.

My skitterlings scurry into position, my sixth sense of their invested flame allowing me to track their movements with a very hazy degree of accuracy. Seconds later, I hear the distant sound of a recorded message echo through the silent halls of the museum.

“In late 2017, just a few months after the shocking introduction of magic to the world, media company Takehara-Ishikawa Entertainment was faced with crisis and opportunity. They had spent the past several years investing significant resources into the development of the world’s first virtual idol company, VisageCorp, in a bid to become the face of the new era of online entertainers. With the advent of real magical girls, however, their cutting edge models and rigging were no longer ahead of the curve. VisageCorp understood immediately that whichever company first secured a magical girl idol would shape the future for generations to come.”

I’m quite proud of my foresight in feeding the skitterlings every line of audio the museum plays the day before. My beautiful spider monster continues its perfect recreation of the founding speech, covering Visage’s partnership with the Starlight Ruby Warriors and Mahou Shoujo Ryu-Ryu, which carried the stipulation that the magical girls of Visage would work on a senpai and kouhai dynamic, answering to their seniors in the organization before any of the group’s moneyed benefactors. The American branch works the same way; the hierarchy for witches stops at Radiance, though she can always be outvoted by Memento and Pearl Princess if they really disagree with her about an employee. To my knowledge, that’s never happened.

“Found it!” Agatha whispers to me. The guard’s unlikely to hear us, especially over the fake recording, but her caution is reasonable.

She’s stopped in front of an exhibit showcasing the current roster of magical girls and witches. It’s one of the museum features that uses fancy hologram tech for easier updates; an Archon hologram has been in here since my debut stream. Somehow, it’s a lot weirder staring at this copy of my face than watching back stream clips.

Agatha crouches next to the pedestal projecting the Big Three: Radiance in her rainbow white, Memento in black and gold, and Pearl Princess in pink and purple. While she looks for something on the hologram device, I consider the Visage NA founders and wonder which of them might be working for Venus.

“Is Pearl Princess too obvious?” I muse. “She’s a beauty streamer, the pearl thing could be a reference to The Birth of Venus, and her aura is one of the few mind-affecting powers on record. She’s almost certainly got Aphrodite. Of course, being so obvious would make her a shit mole, but the egregores don’t seem to be great at subtlety.”

“They’re all suspects,” Agatha murmurs. “Here, check this out.” She puts her glasses back on and points at an icon etched into the metal of the projector, faint enough and positioned well enough that I wouldn’t have noticed it without her. “We use that nowadays to mean ‘female,’ but it’s originally the astronomical symbol for the planet Venus.”

“That sounds like our key.”

The Morrigan explained it like this: magic—or at least, the version of magic that Hastur allows to exist—is a fundamentally balanced system. If you use magic to build a wall, any magic of equal power can break that wall. If you make that wall vulnerable to a particular kind of magic, however, you can make it proportionally stronger against other kinds of magic—and if you put a door in that wall, the effect is amplified tenfold. For the barrier to be completely unaffected by one of Striga’s Minerva-empowered precision strikes, there must be a condition we can reasonably meet to bypass the ward and get inside. A locked door has a key.

“Guard coming back,” Ferromancer warns us. “Now or never.”

“Right. Here goes nothing.”

I take the shifter back from Agatha, we grasp hands, and she covers the symbol of Venus with her other hand. Contact should be enough, according to the Morrigan. If it isn’t, well, there’s always next time.

I activate the shifter and take us into the World of Glass.

In an instant, the museum is gone and I’m standing at the entrance to a theme park inside a circus tent. Roller coasters rumble, children cheer, and pop music plays from an endless array of speakers. I see a water area, a cluster of restaurants, and a Ferris wheel. The structures between the rides have an architectural style that evokes an urban metropolis with glass, steel, and massive digital billboards advertising the park’s various rides and features, though nothing impedes my view of those distant attractions.

There is also, dead center in the artificial amusement park’s circular design, another Visage Spire. The striped cloth of the big top tent stretches down and bunches where the golden orb would be on the real Spire, and from this distance I can just make out the wrinkled impression of something with a lot of limbs behind the drawn curtain.

Joy, another boss monster to defeat.

“May I see your ticket, ma’am? Or do you need to buy one?”

At the entrance to the park is a set of turnstiles that cover a truly laughable portion of the central avenue, making it trivial to just walk around them. A ticket booth is next to the turnstiles, and sitting in that booth, slouched lazily against the counter and dressed in a Visage-branded vest-and-slacks uniform (complete with bowtie) is Venus.

I shoot her in the head. The gun I stole from that joker at the bank job has since been thoroughly modified with Ferromancer’s assistance and my own diligent transformation work to shoot with greater precision, rate of fire, and stopping power. It invests a bit of my flame in every shot to better counteract defensive magic, and it is of course completely ineffective against the golden-eyed goddess of love, beauty, and the adoration of the masses.

I banish the gun and make a noise of disgust. The bullet didn’t even ricochet or flatten against a barrier; it turned into rose petals the second it would have touched her. “Why do guns never work?” I complain. Agatha hides a smile, having not even flinched at the sudden shot. A month ago, she would have.

Venus raises an eyebrow. “Girl, what part of ‘divine daughter of Hastur’ made you think a gun would do anything to me?” The goddess sounds more bemused than offended that I just tried to splatter her brains across the interior of her ticket booth.

“Call it optimism,” I grumble. I eye the turnstile, wondering what would happen if I went around it without paying.

Agatha tugs on my arm and points behind us. “Archon, look outside: it’s Howl.”

At the edge of the circus tent, the curtain parts around a familiar set of glass doors. On the other side, the courtyard where we killed the Spire’s angelic defender is visible, the surrounding restaurants still ravaged by our fight. Howl sits on the edge of the marble fountain, nursing a bottle of whiskey and petting her dog. Both Howl and Fenris are watching the entrance to the Spire, but neither seem to have noticed our appearance.

“If your friend wants in, you’ll need to buy her a ticket.” Venus is back to playing the bored wage slave. “Can I interest you in a set of annual passes? They get you a ten percent discount at participating eateries. Upgrade to the deluxe package for access to the exclusive Club Vivarium in Little Forks.”

I squint at Venus. “You seem… different.”

The goddess grins. Her smile is just as glamorous as ever, her figure somehow eye-catching despite being stuffed into khaki slacks, a stiff white polo, and a purple Visage-branded vest. Her nametag claims ten years of service. “C’mon, kid, you didn’t think that was my only face, did you? We got off on the wrong foot back there, honest mistake. You’re a different kind of customer, I see that now. I can work with that. Just give me a chance, let me show you around, see all the wonders of Venusland Resort in Anaheim, California. Buy a ticket.”

Agatha adjusts her glasses and glares at the egregore. “We’re not selling our souls to get into a Disneyland rip-off, Venus.”

Venus rolls her eyes. “No duh, Detective Cain.”

For some reason, Agatha blushes bright red at that title. She splutters, “That’s—”

Venus waves a hand and cuts her off. “I’m not asking for your souls, or any kind of binding contract—what do you think I am, some kind of extortionist? You made it very clear last time that you’re not interested, and I respect that. All I’m asking is that you play the game. Buy a ticket. Go on a few rides. Eat a churro, for mom’s sake. And, when you’ve done all that… spare a thought for ol’ Venus. Ask yourselves if you have any real reason to distrust me. All I want to do, my little chickadees, is make the world a happier place.”

By brainwashing everyone into your mindless puppets, I’ll bet. I narrow my eyes at Venus. “What’s your price?”

She jerks her thumb at a detailed diagram on the side of the booth listing the benefits of each ticket option. The costs are all listed in dollars, ranging from $200 on the low end to $2,000 per person for the most luxurious year-round park pass.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me.”

Venus grins again. “Will that be cash or card?”

[commentary]

Thank you for reading Book 1 of This Magical Girl is Mine. I hope you will continue reading as we move into Book 2. 

A special thank you to my Grandmaster-tier patrons, whose support has kept food on my table: Adrian CC, Ashlyn, CaosSorge, Crows Danger, Demi, Lirian, M, Mgbm, Mhai Wind, Morrigan, October, Paige Harvey, PR4v1 Samaratunga, and Selacanis. Wow that’s a lot of you! Thank you so much!

If you like this story and want to see more of it, please go to the RR page and leave a rating or review! Web serials live and die on audience support, and this one is no exception. The better the story does on RR, the more people click through and read, the more motivation I have (both on a mental health level and on an “able to pay rent” level) to keep writing and to write faster.

The next scheduled break week starts on the 7th of December. It’ll be another double length break as I work on my second writing project and some outline rewrites for TMGM.

[/commentary]