It’s date night again.

It’s date night again!

After six and a bit days of being cruelly, unjustly parted from my dearest Sophia, our scheduled weekly not-a-date hangout has arrived once more. I mean, it’s not like I’ve been completely separated from her, but I haven’t had any quality time. I need my fix!

Tonight, I get what I’ve been craving. Tonight, at long last, Rachel Emily and Sophia Lane will play Magic: the Gathering together.

“Okay, then I’ll tap like this and cast Show and Tell. Does it resolve?”

None of Delver’s permanents should matter to my deck, even after sideboarding. This game rests entirely on how Sophia responds to my play. Once Omniscience comes down, I have the card advantage and the counterspells to defend it from a bounce spell or a Pyroblast. She has to counter me here. If it’s just one counter, I can fight it with Force of Will. If she’s got two, we’re in for much more of a fight. What do you have, Sophie?

“Um, yeah, sure,” Sophia says, voice distant and weary. She rubs her forehead, staring down at her cards.

“Oh. Uh, okay. We’ll each place the card we chose face down, then flip them at the same time. Artifact, creature, enchantment, or land.”

We pick our cards. I reveal Omniscience, which makes all my spells free to cast. Sophia reveals a basic land.

“So… that’s probably game,” I say with a wince.

Sophia reads Omniscience, then groans and shows me the cards she was holding… including two counterspells she could have cast. “I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight. I know I’m new at the game, but I’m not that new. I just couldn’t… I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

She looks tired. It’s in the bags under her eyes and the slump of her shoulders, and it’s in the ragged edge to a voice normally so precise and controlled. Everything about her screams exhaustion. It has the last few times I’ve gotten to see her, but up close it’s so much worse.

Sophia. What are you doing to yourself? “Hey,” I ask gently, “are you okay? No, let me answer that: you’re not okay, so stop acting like it, yeah? You were missing triggers last game, missing whole cards this game, you’re not in a state to focus on this, obviously, and that’s fine. You don’t need to hold yourself together around me, you know.”

Misery bleeds through her cracked mask. “I promised,” she says, and her voice almost breaks. “I promised I’d play this game with you, so many times, and I always—something always comes up. I just wanted to give you this without it going wrong or disappointing you. I’m—I’m sorry.” She bites off something worse. I can only imagine what kind of insult she was about to throw at herself, but I won’t stand for it.

“Stop beating yourself up,” I order her. “I get to decide if I’m disappointed, alright? And I’m not. It’s just a game, Sophie. All I really want is to spend time with you, and what we spend that time doing is secondary. We can try again some other day—and if we don’t? That’s fine, too. What would actually upset me is if you pushed yourself too hard, which I can tell you’re doing. So let’s ignore the cards and do something easier instead, okay? Let’s watch a movie.”

Sophia smiles softly. “I’d like that. Thank you, Rachel. You’re wonderful.”

I grin. “Hey, maybe this time I’ll make it to the end of Return of the King. Think I remember enough of the first two.”

Sophia giggles. “You better. Then I can start telling you all about The Silmarillion.”

“I feel like you’re saying that as a threat, but you know I’d listen to you talk about anything. Wait, isn’t that the one with the spider girlboss?”

“Is that how Mordacity described Ungoliant? The mother of spiders is not a ‘girlboss,’ she’s the dark spirit from beyond Arda that allied with Melkor to destroy the Two Trees of Valinor—and nearly devoured Melkor!”

“I don’t know what most of those words mean, but Mord told me Ungoliant had ‘real Vriska energy.’ Then she laughed so hard she started coughing.”

“I swear, some day I’m going to kill that woman.”

“Heh. I’ll help.”

I make popcorn, grab some chips, and pour drinks while Sophia gets the movie set up and secures blankets for cuddling under. Once we’re snug and our snacks are piled on the table, Sophie hits play.

To her credit, she makes it ten minutes in before bringing up the books.

“It’s just such a waste to lose the Scouring of the Shire when it’s this perfect bookend to the story that really shows how everyone has grown and how diminished Saruman has become after forsaking the path of wisdom and letting spite consume his thoughts. It’s so petty of him to defile the Shire like that and I think that pettiness is important to understanding his failings.”

“That’s nice, dear,” I say, patting her on the shoulder. She glares at me, mirth in her eyes.

“Also, he starts calling himself Sharkey and gets addicted to pipe-weed.”

“That’s hilarious, how dare they cut the Scouring of the Shire!”

Sophia nuzzles into me and gets comfortable as the movie continues, for which I thank Tolkien and all his legendarium. She’s soft and warm, and it reminds me of the night we spent together all those years ago, though a lot more clothes are involved this time. My heart aches for her closeness, and I try to distract myself from my yearning by actually paying attention to the movie we’re watching.

“Peregrin Took, you spectacular idiot,” I marvel as Pippin steals the evil orb of terrifying madness from Gandalf and stares into it.

“It’s a wonder he survives the trilogy,” Sophia says with a giggle.

We praise the ethereal beauty of the elves and the resplendent architecture of Gondor’s capital, though Sophia slips in a complaint about the lack of farmland around it. When we meet Denethor, she gets really riled up.

“He’s not an idiot—or at least, he shouldn’t be! The beacons were lit in the books, the armies were marshaled, he’s been preparing for this fight. If Denethor is already a raving lunatic, it completely removes the impact of his fall into despair at the seeping darkness of Sauron! He’s not a defender of humanity broken down by the malignance of the Enemy, he’s just some jackass who never should have had the position to begin with. The themes, Rachel!”

“The themes!” I cry dramatically, earning another giggle from my beloved.

“Okay,” she says a couple of scenes later, “I have to admit, Minas Morgul looks awesome like this.” She stops herself in the middle of a yawn and grimaces at herself.

“Sick as hell,” I agree. “Real necromancer fortress. God, why hasn’t some witch built an evil tower and decked it with spikes? None of them have any style.”

After a while, Sophia’s comments settle down. Her head dips a few times and she has to catch herself, and then she says, “Gonna… rest my head. Not sleeping. Getting comfortable.”

“Of course.”

Sophia shifts around under the blankets, stretching out until her feet hit the arm of the couch, and then she lays her head on my lap, facing the TV. Despite her words, it takes less than a minute for her breathing to change. When I stroke her hair, she doesn’t react.

“Already asleep,” I chuckle to myself, keeping my voice low to not disturb her. “Get your rest, Sophie. You need it.”

My sweet Sophie. My poor, exhausted, overworked Sophia. At least, for the moment, she looks peaceful like this, and I get to enjoy the pressure of her weight on my legs.

She’s so cute. I’d kill for you, Sophia. I will. Just to see you smile. To give you these precious moments where you don’t have to fight. I love you. I love you. I love you.

I let myself relax into those feelings for a few minutes, not really paying attention to the movie anymore. Then I pull out my phone and text Mordacity.

Alexandria: deimovore progress?

Mordacity: nah, not yet

Mordacity: tricky bastards, deimovores. affinity for nightmares gives them natural defenses against my method of contact

Mordacity: but ill get it. gimme another week and i should have an in

Alexandria: kay

Alexandria: keep me posted

Mordacity: obvs

Mordacity: so what are you up to

Mordacity: wanna game? i have so many mmos i could sell you on

Mordacity: or we could get really high and piss people off in league

Alexandria: maybe later

Alexandria: watching lord of the rings with soph. she’s sleeping on my lap right now.

Mordacity: ayyy third base

Alexandria: dont be a pig, asshole

Mordacity: idk what ur talking about, i was commentating on a Shohei Ohtani game. dude is a machine in the stadium, dodgers gonna go the distance with him on the team

Alexandria: you learned all that from femur

Alexandria: i was there for the conversation

Mordacity: yeah yeah

Mordacity: cute that your girl is gettin cuddly

Mordacity: not that you’ll do anything about it

Alexandria: yeah

Alexandria: hey, mord

Alexandria: do you think sophia and i will ever be together? like, if i asked her, do you think she’d say yes? like… can you tell?

Mordacity: are you asking me to spy on her feelings? i mean, she’s asleep right now. do you want me to crawl into her head and ask her dreaming mind if she loves you back?

Alexandria: NO

Alexandria: i mean

Alexandria: yes. but please don’t. god, that would be fucked up. fuck, why did i even ask that? what’s wrong with me?

Mordacity: you’re lovesick

Mordacity: but i wouldnt do it, anyway. hard as hell, with her defenses. more importantly, id be pissed the hell off if you got together with her on my word and agonized the whole time about ethics n shit. no heart peeks. do it the hard way.

Alexandria: ha. thanks, i guess

Alexandria: i just… i dont know

Alexandria: i want her so bad, but i dont know if i should. i dont know if im right for her. i love her, but is that good enough? am i good enough?

Alexandria: what i asked before… not the spying part. the first question. do you think sophia and i will ever be together?

Mordacity: Yes. Absolutely. Of course you’ll be together.

Mordacity: In every world, in every timeline, the two of you are inevitable. I can’t imagine a world where the two of you don’t fall in love. You have a connection that I don’t think is possible for most people to have. Certainly not someone like me. You’re made for each other.

Alexandria: wow, thats uh. not what i expected from you. is that like… mystic insight?

Mordacity: No. Just experience.

Alexandria: …not that i mind you taking this seriously, but it’s pretty weird coming from you, M. full capitals and everything.

Mordacity: yeah, well, it’s a weird time. end of the world and all that.

Alexandria: nah. we’re gonna stop it. im gonna stop it

Mordacity: good luck

I put down my phone in time to see Denethor absolutely demolish a tomato, seeds and juices spraying everywhere. Sophia turns fitfully, twitching in her sleep.

Damn savior. Probably stressing out over the Catastrophe, and Venus, and whatever else you’ve piled on your plate without sparing a thought for what it’d do to your health. Always doing too much, and you won’t even complain.

If Sophie won’t offload her burdens, I’ll take them from her. Even if it’s risky. Even if it might make things worse before they get better. I have to do something. I have to save her.

The ritual in the World of Glass, it worked. I earned a claim to usurp Venus. We’re connected, now, in some intangible sense. If I keep pressing, if I do something to take that seat from her, it’ll make a difference. Maybe I won’t be the one who actually kills Venus, but I can at least weaken her for the others. Every ounce of power I can steal from the goddess is an ounce of power she won’t have when Striga tears out her throat.

This is something I can do. This is something I should have been doing, much earlier, but I got complacent. I’ve been playing it too safe. I’ve been letting myself enjoy being a streamer, being popular, while Sophia is suffering.

My audience is a weapon. It’s time to use that weapon. It’s time to up the ante.

Date night’s over. Time to go to war.

[commentary]

A nice break week, and then the endgame begins. Patrons are stepping into the final arc of the book now, to give you an idea of how close we are.

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 8th of February. NEXT WEEK! NO MORE CHAPTERS!

[/commentary]

Agatha Cain was having a wonderful day.

Actually, all of her days had been wonderful since Archon’s ritual. Everything came easier to her, thanks to that spectacular spell. No more anxiously agonizing over what to do and how to act, because now there was a warm glow in her chest cutting through all that useless noise. The glow would get warmer when she was doing the right thing and colder when she was doing the wrong thing, so all she had to do was chase the warmth and enjoy herself.

In her head, she’d started to think of that guiding light as Better Agatha. The Agatha she wished she could be, that she wanted to become, that she was working to become with the ritual’s help.

Normal Agatha would have snoozed her morning alarm at least twice before getting up, but Better Agatha had places to be and a day to seize, so up she went at the first ringing tone. Normal Agatha took long showers—depression showers, to call them what they were—that ate into time Better Agatha would rather spend doing her makeup and going for a run to keep in shape. Normal Agatha ate whatever she had around and often skipped breakfast, but Better Agatha insisted on healthy, filling meals. Stable, consistent nutrition would let her function better if she needed to skip eating while out on a mission.

The glow helped with her career, too. For all that it was her only income stream, discomfort had kept Agatha from really engaging with her position in Visage and her relationship with her fans. Better Agatha nudged her to post more on socials, do research before streams, and actually take some initiative about networking with other magical girls. More pep to that message, don’t end that one with a period or you’ll look like a psychopath, and would it kill you to check your damn emails?

Her schedule was busier than it had been since her first week with Visage, but she could handle that. She’d been spending so much of her time on leisure activities to destress from work that just weren’t necessary with Better Agatha propping up her mood and keeping her focused.

That gave her more time to pursue the task she’d been given by Lady Striga and the conspiracy to save the world. Time to investigate her peers in Visage, aided by her new drive for networking, and determine which of them were traitors to humanity that would need to be put down. Better Agatha relished it.

Yes, Agatha’s life had been much improved since performing that ritual with Archon. The best part of it all was the way she could finally play her role in their mock fights and actually enjoy herself.

“You won’t escape my clutches again!” Archon cackled. The witch lashed out with long trails of ribbon that Agatha cut through with fire and ice. “Blast, stop escaping my clutches!”

“You’ll have to do better than that,” Agatha jeered. “At this rate, I’ll start thinking you don’t even want to catch me!”

The witch and the magical girl soared through a false sky within a giant domed film set. The land below them was a simulacrum of Forks, rendered to evoke its geography and architecture without perfectly replicating any one neighborhood of the city. The people, likewise, were as generic as they could be.

The dome acted like a holodeck, amplifying and absorbing Radiance’s magic to project an artificial world. It wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t need to be; verisimilitude was the name of the game for Visage.

So when Archon set off a string of explosions that brought down a building, no property was actually being damaged. When Agatha fired back with shards of ice that shattered windows, same story. Any illusory people would be conveniently out of the way before debris struck them.

“You’ll regret that when I get my hands on you,” Archon called gleefully. “You’ll be my prize conquest.”

Agatha burned aside another volley of ribbons. “You don’t have what it takes to conquer me, Archon. Give up and maybe I’ll be gentle when it’s your turn to be tied up.”

She wouldn’t have had the confidence to say something like that before the ritual, but why not? Weakness. Cowardice. Valkyrie Cain wouldn’t have hesitated to tease a cute girl. Of course, Valkyrie Cain was bisexual and a fictional character, but those were just details.

Archon grinned. “Well, now I almost want to see you try. Too bad you’ve flown right into my trap.”

At her command, dozens more ribbons burst from dolls hidden in the nearby buildings. It wasn’t, in fact, so many that Agatha couldn’t carve through them and escape, but she knew the script. Carefully, to make it look good, she threw icicles around to cut through only about a third of her assailants.

The remaining ribbons wrapped her up and pulled her tight against nondescript brickwork, looping around shattered windows so any attempts to escape would be struggling against the weight of the building. The way she was bound and restrained wasn’t excessively lewd in presentation, but Agatha knew that it would still excite a certain portion of the watching audience. Normal Agatha was self-conscious about that fact; Better Agatha understood that presentation was just another weapon to be used.

She pulsed fire from her hands to escape, just like she had the first time Archon had caught her, but these ribbons didn’t catch fire. Her eyes widened, though it wasn’t really a surprise; this, too, was part of the script.

Archon swooped in, black wings beating steadily, and raked her gaze across her victim. “I don’t make the same mistake twice, darling Agatha. Now I have all the time in the world to take you in and make you mine.”

She trailed her fingers through Agatha’s hair and down the side of her face, grinning with malevolent glee. Agatha’s breath caught and she turned away, but only partly, her eyes staying locked on Archon’s. Shying away, but not too discomforted, not disgusted. Her emotions needed to be read as complicated, so each viewer could interpret what they wanted to see.

And it was easy. Every change in expression was buoyed by encouragement from the warm glow of Better Agatha. Now gasp—is it just surprise, or something more? Let it flow.

Really, playing the role should have always been that easy. It’s not like Archon was unattractive. Sure, Agatha wasn’t gay, but was that such a hard line? Plenty of straight girls pretended to like each other for male attention, getting drunk and kissing each other at parties. Plenty of straight girls wished they could feel it for real and find love with another woman, wished they were gay so they wouldn’t have to date men. Agatha was playing along for a better reason. For the mission. To defeat Venus. For a purpose that grand, what was the harm in leaning in? What was the harm in flirting back?

What was the harm in enjoying it, just a little, when Archon’s thumb brushed her lip?

A sunburst interrupted their private moment.

“Hands off the girl, creep,” said Dawn, first of the Twilight Sisters, as she nocked another gleaming arrow to her bow.

“If you’re going to hunt one of ours, be prepared to be hunted in turn,” said Dusk, the other Twilight Sister, her hands wreathed in starry darkness.

Archon hissed at the new arrivals, turning from Agatha and conjuring a bow of her own. “Stay out of this! You—how dare you!”

The rest of the scene flew by. Archon put up a good fight against the sisters, but once Agatha was freed from her bindings the outcome was obvious. With a few more cries of rage at being foiled, Archon flew away.

The Twilight Sisters teased Agatha for getting caught, Agatha insisted she had it handled with her best tsundere “hmph,” and that was that. And if she felt a little genuinely disappointed at being saved, she didn’t express that.

As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, Archon zipped out of hiding and threw herself at the Twilight Sisters with glee. “Oh my gosh, I am so excited to meet you! I’ve watched so many of your vlogs, you have no idea. I’m a huge fan, I adore the two of you. Fantastic dynamic, really fun to follow along. Dusk’s rivalry with Memento? Stellar! Celestial! Dawn, I love your bunny, I would kill for it, seriously just give the word.”

“I kinda got that vibe from your roundup,” Dusk said dryly. “But damn, you’re really like that, huh?”

“Don’t tease her,” Dawn said as she pulled her phone out of storage and started scrolling. “We need more people with genuine enthusiasm for the job. Can you imagine if every new hire was another Kira?”

Agatha didn’t get involved. There was value in networking, but right now that was Archon’s game; Agatha’s job was to gather information. Under the guise of needing to rub her eyes—and staying to the side of everyone, not hiding but not in clear vision—she took off her glasses and looked with Ariadne.

Under Agatha’s second sight, the world was a mess of connections. Her mantle’s interpretation of the myth of Ariadne was alloyed in some strange sense with the memetic image of the conspiracy corkboard. Every clue was tied in string, and every color of string carried a different meaning that Agatha had pieced together through relentless trial and error.

The particular shade of orange that implied a familial connection was completely absent between Dusk and Dawn, confirming that they were not, in fact, real sisters. There was another shade that meant found family, but that wasn’t present either. A green string told Agatha that the Twilight Sisters at least considered each other friends, but it was a pale, lackluster green.

Coworkers. Minor antipathy toward each other. Minor antipathy from Dusk toward Archon. Minor interest in becoming more familiar from Dawn toward Archon. Blood family somewhere to the north for Dawn, weaker blood family to the south for Dusk. A web of friendships, rivalries, and romantic entanglements. Desire for material possessions. Wariness toward someone in a position of authority. Envy. Discomfort. Attraction.

When Agatha had first been given her powers, she wanted to be a magical detective. She ran around her city—Seattle, not Forks, before she joined up with Visage—spying on everyone and asking questions to those who would answer in search of clues to understand her magic. Family, friends, and coworkers were all easy, but the more emotional threads took work to puzzle out.

The first time she met Memento, Radiance, and Pearl Princess, she didn’t know what the thread for greed meant, but she did recognize the thread that represented a desire for attention. Those three were connected to a dizzying number of people.

They were also, Agatha had learned after returning from the World of Glass, connected to the other side.

Memento, Radiance, Sweet Tooth, Sonata, and Narcissa all had one kind of connection, marked by impossibly-colored glass thread. Pearl Princess, Maenad, and Glamour had a different kind of otherworldly connection, though Agatha didn’t understand the difference and wouldn’t have been able to describe the visual marker. Strix Striga had a third variety, likely marking her connection to the egregore Minerva as a direct champion. That clue made Agatha suspect that the group of three were more closely tied to Venus, while the group of five were at a remove. She’d checked everyone else in Visage, and none of them had threads like those.

Well, except for Archon.

The witch who had gifted Agatha with confidence was bound up in the most interesting tangle of threads that Agatha had ever seen. A strand of green fire connected Archon to Agatha, but there was also a second thread of the same material leading somewhere else in the city. Her family threads were so frayed as to be nonexistent, and her friend threads were touched with that online-only pallor. Her desires and grudges were all atrophied and frail, except for one and the shadow of a second.

A thread of glass—a fourth variety, though again she couldn’t tell how she knew—led away to the Visage Spire, same as those connecting all the other Visage marked. Something that hadn’t been there before the ritual.

And, lastly, the brightest and most vibrant of all Archon’s threads: the red string of fate, wrapped around her finger and binding her to Strix Striga. Love, pure and consuming. Destiny, if such a thing could be said to exist. To Ariadne’s eye, Archon and Strix Striga were meant to be together. Agatha had only ever seen this red thread rarely, on couples that had been together for a very, very long time, and once on a young couple so perfect for each other it was like their love had been written in the stars.

For some reason, since the day of the ritual, that thread, more than any other, had started to bother Agatha.

[commentary]

Y’all ever read Worm? There was this character I really liked in it, can’t quite recall the name. I think it was… Amy?

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 8th of February.

[/commentary]

The second edible bloomed inside Phoebe’s body and brain, the process of chemical release accelerated by precise modifications to the deimovore’s digestive system. What normally took nearly an hour was achieved in seconds. A dopey smile spread across Phoebe’s face as it walked into the Taco Bell it had been loitering outside.

“One of everything, please,” it said with a giggle. “I’ll take the whole menu.”

The girl behind the counter gave Phoebe a once-over, sighed, and said, “Yeah, we can do that, but I’m gonna need you to list off the specific items you want.”

Five minutes later, Phoebe spent $150 from a dead man’s credit card, filled up three drink cups, and sat down to wait for its food. All three cups were empty by the time food was served.

Phoebe dug into the spread with gusto. Tacos, burritos, quesadillas. Tortilla, beans, cheese, sauce, onions, lettuce, jalapeno, tomato, potato, steak, chicken, beef. Fat, cholesterol, sugar, salt, grease, protein, starch. It was a symphony of processed filth, amplified to incredible heights by the heady power of cannabis and the warm pulse of the emerald spark.

The deimovore ate like a raccoon, only less polite. It reveled in the unique squelching and crunching sounds made by each different item on the menu. The texture of each, the odor, the lowering temperatures as Phoebe made its way through the feast.

The girl at the counter watched in horror, her manager beside her, both visibly disturbed by the extravagant display of gluttony.

“Get ready to call an ambulance,” the manager muttered, his lip curled in disgust. “There’s no way a girl that skinny can eat all that food without having a heart attack.”

“Do you think she’s a magical girl?” the cashier whispered. “They could do something like that, right? I watched a stream with Kira and that new girl at Visage, Archon, and they totally pigged out together.”

“If she is, she better not bring any trouble to my store. Now get back to work.”

Phoebe kept eating. The two of them were being quiet enough that a normal person wouldn’t have been able to hear them, but the deimovore had shapeshifted the insides of its ears for better range and precision of hearing. It heard every rancid noise their bodies made.

I want to kill that man. I bet it would be really, really fun to make him scream for me and lick his eyes and pulverize his bones and drink the marrow and smear him across the asphalt. I want to drink his terror as I chase him into the woods. I’m so very, very hungry…

Phoebe finished its meal and belched loudly, enjoying the sloshing of chemicals in its stomach. Everything that it had eaten was being rapidly transmuted, made a part of the deimovore, repurposed. Muscles and bones were strengthened, enhanced, amplified.

Mundane food was incapable of truly sustaining the life force of a deimovore—it wasn’t fear, after all—but the raw materials were useful to Phoebe, bound as it was in a corporeal form. When it had first transformed in that bookstore, granted a body by Rachel’s magic, it had felt stretched and thin. Before, it could have taken any shape it liked without a care, but a real body demanded real mass.

The deimovore disposed of its meal’s assorted paper waste and left the building. Then, as soon as the two employees inside weren’t watching, it crept around out back and leaned against the wall next to the rear entrance and the dumpster.

Every part of the deimovore’s new body was organic and malleable. Even the clothing it wore was part of its body, and would rot to gray muck if taken too far from the central mass. Phoebe had experimented thoroughly with its limits soon after arriving on Earth, exploring new capabilities and working around the loss of old ones.

For Phoebe, shapeshifting was as natural as breathing. When it wanted to change, the impulse that drove the change couldn’t even be described as an exertion of will; it was automatic, reflexive, instinctual. The deimovore willed the change and it happened.

Clothes, hair, skin, and eyes were all papered over with a thin layer of chromatophores—color-changing cells that would disguise Phoebe’s presence to the casual observer through natural camouflage. In the World of Glass, it could have simply turned invisible or dispersed as mist, but with a body of meat and bone that was much more difficult.

For a winter evening in one of the quieter parts of Forks, chromatophores sufficed.

As it waited, the deimovore let itself slip into daydreams of prior victims. Back home, it had been a persistence predator; it selected its prey, drank their memories, and chased them across the shifting landscape of the World of Glass—haunting them at every turn with their own worst nightmares—until their heart gave out from exhaustion, overwork, and sheer fright.

That didn’t work in the city. Sure, the forest was a short walk away, but preying on hikers was so lacking. Any ordinary woodland bear could terrorize a hiker. There weren’t even any hallucinogenic swamps to drive people into. Besides, the trek there and back would give Phoebe less time to sample the mortal delights of Forks.

The hunt would be far, far more interesting with a little twist. Before, Phoebe had always been limited by its inability to harm or physically restrain its victims. Now, with a real body, there were so many new and exciting possibilities available to explore. So many ways it could pin someone down, trap them in a concrete box, and hurt them.

Phoebe had killed its first victim in his own home. He’d been a divorced man living in the suburbs, his family having left him after a long pattern of abuse. History of alcoholism, DUI, the works, all of it learned after a chance encounter behind the 7-Eleven where he went for his weekly booze haul. In the dead of night, the man in a drunken stupor, Phoebe tormented him with the faces of his ex-wife and their kids. It was child’s play to make itself stronger than him and keep him trapped inside the house every time he tried to run away. When dawn came, he begged for the nightmare to end. Phoebe obliged.

The sound of the back door opening drew the deimovore from its recollection. It peeled back the chromatophores over its eyes and saw the manager from before stepping out for a late night smoke break. Nobody else was around. Perfect.

The chemicals responsible for Phoebe’s high could be converted like anything else. In an instant its brain was purged of cannabinoids and flushed with adrenaline. It lunged for the man in uniform, snaked a hand over his mouth, and injected him with a dozen paralytic needles extruded from its flesh. Before he’d even realized what was happening, he was frozen and helpless before the deimovore. Rachel’s spell hummed in Phoebe’s soul, singing in harmony with Phoebe’s hunger at the sudden scent of fear.

“Let’s see what juicy memories you have for me,” it cooed. Its canines lengthened and it bit down on its victims neck, teeth gliding easily through skin. Before, that process would have been bloodless; with Rachel’s gift, flesh was torn, though it would heal quickly.

Phoebe’s mind was uniquely suited to processing vast quantities of information in the blink of an eye. The moment contact was made, it devoured all of its victim’s memories and could begin sifting through them as needed. For prey like Rachel, it had immediately started integrating memories as fast as possible in preparation for their next encounter. For something like this lowly worm, it took a shallow, leisurely approach.

Phoebe dropped the human—still paralyzed—and drank in the texture of his being. First, always, was the deimovore’s food. It learned that he was afraid of spiders, his own mortality, and clowns; a rather trite selection, but more workable than his vivid night terror of being trapped on the International Space Station with only bean burritos to eat.

More disappointing was the information that Phoebe searched for next: there were people who would miss this man if he was gone. Friends, family, a loving partner, the whole disgusting spectrum. They would search if he vanished, press the police if he was murdered, maybe even escalate to the magical girls if Phoebe couldn’t hide its tracks properly.

Still, that didn’t make it impossible. There were probably better targets, but Phoebe was so damn hungry. With Echidna around, disappearances were easily explained away.

But as Phoebe considered that course of action and reached down to grab the man again, a terrible emptiness cut through its soul. A thought, unbidden, that Sophia Lane would not condone removing that man from the world. Too normal, too innocent, too undeserving of the kind of suffering that the deimovore longed to inflict. It was a stupid, pointless, irritating thought, but the spark in her chest that gave her form—in its chest, that gave it form—wouldn’t let Phoebe escape the irrational fear of disappointing Sophia.

Phoebe snarled and stalked away from the man, leaving him crumpled on the ground. Unlike those bastard mantled, an ordinary human had no protections against deimovore toxin, so his brain would cook for a few more minutes until the amnestic properties kicked in and he forgot ever seeing Phoebe.

It wished it could turn into a bird and fly again, but it would have to vomit up all the mass it had just spent an evening integrating. It wanted to kill. It wanted to rampage. It wanted to find a family of four and paint their home red with the blood of the innocent.

But that wasn’t what Rachel would do. That wasn’t compatible with being the kind of person that Sophia Lane could love.

Phoebe screamed into the night and clawed at her—its, goddammit—hair. The deimovore had made a mistake and now it was paying the price. It had never had a reason to bite someone a second time, never filled itself with two sets of memories from the same person, and it couldn’t have predicted what effect that would have on the ritual—a ritual that had only ever been performed once before that.

There was too much Rachel floating in its brain when the spark made contact. Too many arguments about how alike they were, too many comparisons drawn to the empty hunger in both of them. The spark knew that Phoebe wanted to terrorize and revel, but the spark also thought that Phoebe wanted what Rachel wanted: Sophia.

Just thinking about Sophia brought a perverse warmth to the deimovore; neurons firing, lust and need and desperation rising up from the depths of Rachel’s stolen memories. The desire to taste her and the need to save her had been immortalized by the emerald spark’s transforming influence.

“I’m not a person!” Phoebe hissed at the spell. “I’m not Rachel, I don’t love Sophia, and I don’t love, period, because I! Am not! Human! Don’t you dare paint me as one of those disgusting freaks. Stop it!”

There was a kind of twisted, condescending benevolence to the nature of the spark. The spell acted on what the recipient wanted, but a thinking mind is full of too many conflicting desires for all to be treated equally. The spark had seized on a model that elevated Phoebe’s hungers and Rachel’s hungers over the noise of everything else.

When Phoebe acted in accordance with that model, it was bombarded with positive reinforcement to keep it acting that way—a constant glow of warm, pleasant reassurance that everything was right in the world. In those precious moments of highest synchronicity, the spark felt better than any meal, any high, any sex.

And when Phoebe went against that model, all those good feelings vanished. The sudden absence was like stepping through the ice and plunging into the depths of a frozen lake. There was a hole where everything wonderful used to burn bright, and it was so obvious how to get those good feelings back. Just go along. Keep acting like you’re supposed to act.

The deimovore laughed to itself. “You created a real monster, bitch. Good job.”

The body was still worth what Phoebe had paid, even with the added tangle. The spark could be beaten, Phoebe was sure of that, and until then, it could be managed. Phoebe just had to keep throwing itself into the right hungers and eventually, surely, the spell would realize how it had gotten her personality wrong.

Phoebe found the nearest bar, drank until it couldn’t think anymore, and passed out at the end of an alley.

Phoebe woke to a Forks that was completely empty. No people, no birds, no bugs. The streets seemed to stretch forever. The signs on the buildings were all illegible. Above, the sky was endless black filled with thin, barely-visible white lines in the shape of a giant spiderweb.

“I’m dreaming,” the deimovore realized immediately.

Then a wizard hit Phoebe in the face with a baseball bat. “Round eight, let’s go!” Mordacity cheered as the deimovore fell over, hit the ground hard, and rolled.

“What the fuck!?” Phoebe picked itself up, rubbing its head and wondering why that felt so familiar. “What is your problem, you psycho!?” The deimovore morphed claws and raised its arms defensively, but Mordacity didn’t approach.

The wizard grinned and twirled her bat. “My problem is that you are an annoying little bitch. I’ve spent the past week trying to infiltrate your dreams and it’s not fuckin’ working. What is it with you Pandemonium freaks and being such good lucid dreamers? All you have to do is let me in and we can finally make some real progress.”

“I don’t want you in my dreams,” Phoebe snarled. “Get out of my head, Mallory.”

Mordacity’s mouth twitched. “Y’know, taunting me ‘cause you know the name on my papers was pretty weak the first time you did it, so it’s really out of bite by the eighth. If you wanted the low blow, shoulda used my deadname. But I tell you that every time, don’t I?”

Phoebe went for the throat. Predictably, Mordacity vanished the second before the deimovore’s claws connected, and then a boot from behind sent Phoebe sprawling.

“Got a message from Rachel,” the wizard said. “Sure you don’t wanna hear it?”

“She can tell me herself,” the deimovore spat as it rose to its feet once more. “Get out of my fucking head!”

“Nah,” said the wizard, and then she flicked her wrist and dropped a building on Phoebe—or rather, the building began to fall, but a flick of Phoebe’s wrist suspended the structure in midair. Mordacity sighed. “See, this is why I find lucid dreamers so annoying; they know how to fight back.”

“Why can’t you just give me her message and leave?” Phoebe demanded.

“Because we’ve done this song and dance seven times and you haven’t remembered it once,” Mordacity said coldly. “Because you won’t remember it until you let me in.”

“Bullshit. You just want in my head like you got in Rachel’s and everyone else’s.”

The wizard grinned again. “Guilty. And new girl, if there’s one thing you gotta learn, it’s that I’m really, really good at getting what I want.”

Mordacity clapped her hands and the world broke.

—plummeting through the air from a thousand feet up, the ground rushing—

—plunging into the mire, light vanishing, muckwater pouring into lungs—

—deep in the bowels of the earth, surrounded by fire and rock—

—coughing up soil in a shallow grave, the coffin lid being lowered—

—and planting face-first into the sand. Crabs and gulls gathering to watch. The push and pull of the tide. The sun, blazing overhead. A cloudless blue sky. White thread lacing a web.

“I tried the carrot a few times,” the wizard claimed. She was sitting on a folding chair beneath a solitary palm tree, a cooler full of beer at her side. “Offered freedom, power, the works, but you didn’t bite. This time it’s just the stick. Look around, kid, ‘cause this is your future if you keep telling me no.”

They were on a small island. One tree, a stretch of sand, nothing else. There wasn’t any other land in sight, just endless blue waves for all around. “You wouldn’t.”

Mordacity cackled. “Bitch, you know me as well as Rachel does. I absolutely would, and I’d have a blast doing it. So let me in, or I teleport you to a deserted island in a random ocean and you can starve alone until I get what I want.”

For the first time, Phoebe hesitated. “Rachel would know where I was. She’d wonder what happened. She’d figure out you were responsible—that you messed with one of her projects instead of helping.”

The wizard gasped and smushed her cheeks in with her hands. “Oh gosh, you think so? I mean, wow, that’s a really interesting theory. If only I had years of experience telling her what she wants to hear! If only she trusted me implicitly, while you’re the random fucking monster she picked up on a whim! Man, that would really suck for you, wouldn’t it? But, hey, enjoy your tropical vacation to Bumfuck, Nowhere. How’s the hunger treatin’ ya, Pheebs?”

The hunger gnawed relentlessly, exacerbated by the denial of its last meal. If the wizard trapped it on an island, the hunger would get worse and worse until the deimovore reverted to the mindset of its less refined cousins—an animal, driven by base instincts and incapable of higher thought. A mere beast.

She’d do it. She’d torture me until I lacked the will to resist her, and then she’d snare me anyway. I don’t have a choice here, do I?

Phoebe glared at Mordacity with undisguised hate. “I hope the King in Yellow pops you like a rotten grape. Fine, you vicious shit. You’re invited in, like the wannabe vampire you are.”

“Finally.” The web overhead thickened, tightened, stretched taut, and a single strand fell from the sky. White thread lashed to Phoebe’s neck and encircled it, the other end floating gently into Mordacity’s outstretched hand. The wizard smirked. “Y’know, my web is good for spying, but actually controlling people? That’s tricky. You, though… you’re gonna be a little easier to pull around by the hooks and keep an eye on while you’re awake. Benefits of being a dream creature, yeah?”

“You bastard!” Phoebe snarled. “I don’t know why Rachel trusts you, but she’s wrong.”

“Because I’ve spent a decade working on her,” Mordacity chuckled. “Pushed her boundaries until the act of pushing felt normal, teased her by talking around what I knew, made her expect the unexpected and roll with it. Rachel’s pretty easy to figure out, really. Keep the banter flowing, keep tossing new ideas at her, and all those little defense mechanisms will take over and she’ll try to social mirror her way into some conversational advantage even when the correct response is to stop talking and start punching.”

Phoebe curled its lip. “You’re a real piece of shit, Tom.”

Mordacity snorted. “Well, I suppose that one’s on me for giving you the idea in the first place. Still.” She coiled the spidersilk leash around her hand and yanked on it with enough force to send the deimovore to its hands and knees, coughing and sputtering in the sand. “Call me that again and you won’t like what happens next. Do we have an understanding?”

Through gritted teeth, Phoebe hissed, “Yes, we do.”

“Wonderful! In that case… there’s work to be done, my dearest deimovore. You’re going to help me move a few more pieces into place before the big event. Let’s make sure this Valentine’s is one for the ages.”

[commentary]

It was really funny reading reactions to the Mordacity reveal chapter and having a few people complain about Rachel getting a really powerful ally out of nowhere. I’d thought the friction point would be people getting upset with Rachel trusting Mordacity too easily, not people trusting Mordacity too easily.

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 8th of February.

[/commentary]

“Alright, chat, that’s enough Minecraft for one day. Agatha should still be streaming for another hour, so go watch her. Or else!! Peace, nerds.”

I cut the stream, shove my viewers onto Agatha’s page, and check in with my assigned manager just to make triple sure there isn’t anything else I need to do before calling it. As soon as I get the okay, I leap off the computer and throw myself onto my big, comfy bed.

I breathe a sigh of relief and sink into the covers. The pillows, the blankets, the mattress, all of it perfectly calculated to be impossibly soft and supportive. I could stay here for hours, away from the rest of the world, away from all those glaring screens and the hordes of people behind them. A nice, happy break from the torments of the internet.

Instead, I immediately open my phone and start texting my friends, because I’m a digital addict and incapable of feeling shame over that fact.

Alexandria: heyyyy good stream good stream

Alexandria: she lied as easily as she breathed

Mike Trout: easier, even!

Alexandria: i hate minecraft

Mike Trout: Hey you take that back right now what the fuck

Mike Trout: You’re going to make me and my smoking hot girlfriend cry

a single femur: Is the girlfriend thing going to be a recurring bit or do you just need to get it out of your system today?

Mike Trout: Wouldn’t you like to know! Smile

Alexandria: okay that’s not true it’s fine, minecraft is fine, but oh my god i need a break from the fucking SMP bullshit. gonna scream and cry and rupture seven nineteenths of my organs if i have to spend any more time on that server this month

I’ve been playing Minecraft on and off stream for weeks, having joined the Visage survival server a month ago in preparation for doing collabs with other performers. I set up my base, I hoarded useful items, and I laid extravagant plans to mess with my prey.

It was all incredibly, atrociously, mind-numbingly boring.

Here’s the problem: the Visage server is completely sauceless. There are no fun mods to get into, everyone’s swimming in endgame materials, and there are a bunch of behind-the-scenes rules that limit what kind of griefing you can get away with.

Pit and cage traps are fine, along with anything else easily circumvented, but TNT traps? Lava inside a wooden structure? Any trap with a serious risk of harm to a player’s belongings or builds? Absolutely not.

Despite the kayfabe that surrounds our battles in Forks being such an emphasized part of the performance, it’s almost completely absent in the game world. Witches and magical girls have their rivalries—they even live on separate islands—but they share the same Forks-themed spawn town, frequently give each other gifts, and almost never kill each other.

It’s boring! Where’s the action? Where’s the excitement? They could have built warring kingdoms obsessed with control over resource-rich biomes between their respective bases! They could have put all of the witches in the Nether to come pouring out of portals! It could have been modded Minecraft with magic versus machines or rival companies racing to complete moon rockets! They could have done any amount of sincere fucking roleplay!

But alas, I don’t live in any of those far more interesting worlds. Instead, I got the neutered, dull, toothless version of an SMP, reduced to papering walls with funny signs and pelting other players with harmless snowballs.

Alexandria: this is all mordacity’s fault

Mordacity: I say that every day

a single femur: I say thatFUCK

Mordacity: get sniped, idiot

Alexandria: if you hadnt introduced me to those youtubers who dropped nukes on each other i wouldnt be in this mess! id be fine, happily lapping up the milk of mediocrity!

a single femur: When they say ignorance is bliss I do think they’re speaking aspirationally. Perhaps you should consider a lobotomy

Mordacity: first of all they’re not “those youtubers” they’re the Yogscast. put some respect on their name, clown

Mordacity: and second yeah no i did that on purpose to make this worse for you

Alexandria: AUGUGH i cant even tell if youre serious or not because you’d absolutely claim credit either way

Mordacity: that’s the mordacity guarantee ba-by

Mike Trout: What if instead of playing Minecraft on stream we all played Minecraft together on a server hosted by my smoking hot girlfriend?

Mike Trout: her name on discord is Samantha Altwoman and she has very pretty eyes and she’s even more normal than me

a single femur: Do you actually want me to invite her

a single femur: Because we will have to hold a vote

Mordacity: eh, the sanctity of the space was disrupted the moment we let that loser A join us, so i vote yes

Alexandria: i was here first you absolute goblin im going to strangle you with your own intestines and melt your hands to your spleen

Alexandria: also can she keep a secret about the witch thing that’s my only real concern

A ping from my other phone steals my attention. Visage hooked me up with a work phone when I joined to make it easier to separate my social media accounts and not accidentally post personal details to my professional persona. I bought a bedazzled case for it so the awful texture would discourage me from doomscrolling while on the wrong profile.

Agatha Cain: Hey, taking an ad break but I’ll be on again soon, just wanted to say thanks for the great stream and hope you’re doing good <3

Archon: ofc! Glad you had fun <3

Archon: Doing way better on the back and forth, damn girl

Agatha Cain: Aw, thank you! I think the practice really helped. I’ll make sure to get some more in before our next stream together, which I’m super looking forward to by the way!!!! Okay, gotta go, ttyl!

Archon: see you then! or sooner, if we’re still on for bagels at that place i know. good rest of stream!!! have good bye friend!!

Agatha seems like she’s doing good. More confident but still dorky, better at playing the tsundere game but still awkward. Everything worked out! So it’s fine, and I don’t need to worry about anything going wrong with her or the deimovore.

I toss my work phone across the bed and pick up my personal phone again, but I don’t rejoin the conversation yet. Idly, almost unconsciously, I check on the two emerald sparks still burning in the back of my mind.

To my relief, the embers I forged didn’t vanish in the night; my fix to the duration problem worked, and now I can cast persistent transformations.

One side effect I hadn’t thought about when I was casting the spell made itself clear when I checked my magic in the morning; through my link to the sparks I crafted, I now always have a rough idea of where both Agatha and the deimovore—Phoebe now, I guess—are in relation to me.

The sensation is only vague, luckily for them, though it still feels a bit like stalking. If I spent a few days triangulating I could probably pinpoint the exact building or even room that Agatha lives in, but for now I just know the direction it’s in from my place—assuming she’s even in her own home right now, which isn’t a certainty; if someone tracked me, would they be able to tell which of my apartments I considered my real home?

I caught a ping of Phoebe yesterday that I didn’t pay much attention to at the time. Today she’s halfway across the city from where I sensed her last, and she’s been moving all day. If I had to guess, I imagine she’s probably on a massive bender sampling all the mortal delights she ranted about.

At some point I should really track her down and talk to her, but first I need to figure out how to sneak that past the Jovians. Maybe I could arrange a meeting with Mordacity. Of course, I’ll have to signal that somehow.

Ultimately, I didn’t go into yesterday expecting to have a shapeshifter ally, so it’s pretty low on my priority list. It’ll be nice to have, but not strictly necessary for any of my plans. She can have her fun for at least a few days before I start scheming up how to make use of her.

Alexandria: hey im back i died i was reborn im literally jesus can someone recap whatever i missed so i dont have to scroll up

a single femur: It’s been less than ten minutes since your last message

a single femur: You cannot be this TikTok-brained

a single femur: This is iPad baby behavior

Mike Trout: we were talking about how excited everyone is to meet my smoking hot girlfriend, Samantha Altwoman, who’s going to join the server as soon as femur sends her an invite so we can talk about Minecraft and computers

Alexandria: oh good, nothing i need to care about

Alexandria: be back in a bit, thsi bitch is THIRSTY

Mordacity: thsi

a single femur: thsi

Mike Trout: thsi

My bed is so, so soft, but I valiantly struggle my way to the edge of the bed, drape myself over the side, and inch away until I have no choice but to stand up or fall. I fall.

Downstairs, I crack open the fridge and debate which drink I should inhale. Am I in the mood for alcohol? After three hours of fucking Minecraft, absolutely. I grab a margarita can, pop the lid, and start guzzling.

How many meals have I eaten since waking up, and does that number sound appropriate? Have I been drinking water?

I mutter aloud mutinously at my trained reminder, but regrettably, the Rachel who developed that habit had a point. I pour myself a glass of water to go with the booze and start picking through my freezer for something to eat. I settle on a bowl of buffalo mac and shove it in the microwave.

Outside, the sun has long set. The park outside my apartment is kept just lit enough for midnight pedestrians to make their way through, which lends it a nice, moody atmosphere.

While I wait for my dinner, I text Mordacity in our private DMs.

Alexandria: heyyyyy bestie, my beloathed, my dearest and most hated of friends

Alexandria: when are you coming over

Alexandria: you said january and its january so like, get moving bitch

Alexandria: on an unrelated purely hypothetical note how hard do you think it would be for you to hide our conversation from the CIA

Mordacity: are you asking me if i can twist the veil so thoroughly that it covers my location, your location, and the location of every data center that our messages bounce between or get stored in by discord, thus preventing the jovians and egregores from spying on our communique? is that what you’re asking?

Alexandria: yeah that

Mordacity: of course i can, dont be ridiculous

Alexandria: cool fuck you

Alexandria: hey i did something kinda crazy and i might need your help

Mordacity: is this about the deimovore you gave a meat body

Alexandria: how do yoU KNOW THAToh you’re still spying on my dreams aren’t you?

Mordacity: yup yup

Mordacity: gonna get my hooks in that fucker as soon as i can, btw

Alexandria: you can do that? of course you can do that, dont even say it

Mordacity: never dreamwalked a deimovore, so that’s prooooobably gonna be a trip

Mordacity: but once i have it snared, getting the two of you in touch should be trivial

Alexandria: right! well. i guess that’s that. i can sorta track it so i thought we might end up chasing it through the city, but this way sounds easier

Alexandria: for me, which is the important part

Alexandria: but seriously thank you

Mordacity: eh, i was gonna want it in my web regardless of if you asked or not, and this still might end in a bit of running, but we’ll see

Alexandria: “in my web” oh my god you kin the spiderbitch so hard

Mordacity: spider8itch, motherfucker

I grab my meal from the microwave and consider seeing if the nerds are up for movie night. We’re overdue. The real question is whether I stay here or head back to Sophie’s apartment. A pang of pain runs through me at the thought. Earlier today, I mused about the difficulty of telling which apartment was my real home. To my discomfort, I’m not entirely sure about that myself. Just for a little longer. Just a few more weeks.

The urge overtakes me and I start texting Sophia.

Rachel: hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi hi

Rachel: hope work is not stabbing you with ten billion needles and extracting your Sophia energy to power a terrible machine beneath the depths of forks washington

Rachel: because that’s my job :3

Rachel: anyway. thinking about maybe staying over at a friend’s palce tonight since you said you’d probably be out really late and would crash immediately when you get home BUT if that’s not the case then plz text and tell me it won’t be an imposition at all just tell me

Rachel: no worries either way, obviously

Rachel: seriously though i hope you’re doing good and i’m really really really erally looking forward to this friday and the arcade

Rachel: it’s gonna be great! super awesome. worth the wait.

Rachel: sorry this is kind of a lot of messages haha please dont like freak out when you see eighty unreads from me lmao

Rachel: since i figure you’re not even going to see these for another couple hours

Sophia: I will be home late, sadly. You have my apologies, Rachel. I hope you enjoy your evening, and I can’t wait to spend Friday with you at the arcade.

Sophia: I always find time to check my phone when I see it’s from you 🙂 I promise, if you ever need me urgently I’ll see it.

“I love you,” I whisper, and then I throw my phone onto the couch and groan, followed by running over to pick it up again because I need to let the nerds know I’m ready.

Alexandria: okay im back let’s drag samantha into the server and watch morbius

Mike Trout: we are not doing that we are watching Parkour Civilization

Mike Trout: it’s literally peak

Mordacity: consider the many benefits of watching the Warcraft movie

a single femur: You mean the benefit of listening to you whine the entire time about how it’s not accurate to the books

Mordacity: yes obviously

Alexandria: you still haven’t offered a bribe high enough for me to agree to watch that

a single femur: What we should watch is Babette’s Feast the 1987 Danish classic

Mike Trout: it sounds like Parkour Civilization wins by default! yippee!

Alexandria: there are less painful lobotomies, i vote morbius

Mordacity: i survived vampire civilization in minecraft a feature film by visionary content creator mordacity, a mordacity pictures production

a single femur: Fuck it, Samantha can decide

<Samantha Altwoman has joined the server.>

Samantha Altwoman: Hello! Nice to meet you! TC 450k

Samantha Altwoman: Just letting you know up front that I am not an LLM and not currently being paid by Microsoft!

Samantha Altwoman: Ooo we’re doing movie night? I know a one hour video of aquatic sea life making noises that we can watch! It has captions!

I grab an edible from the cupboard, then a second. That’s going to be the best way to experience this movie night, and may future Rachel deal with the consequences so that I don’t have to.

[commentary]

Writing the chat segments is really, really fun. I need an excuse to do it more.

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 8th of February.

[/commentary]

“I know your tricks now,” I warn the deimovore. My fingers tighten around the trigger of my magically-modified handgun. “You can’t hurt me with anything but words, and I’m not the same girl you tormented before. I can leave any time I want.”

The other Rachel tilts her head curiously. “Then why haven’t you? No, really. I can taste your fear; right now you’re scared, but not of being hurt. No, you’re afraid that I’ll bite you again and learn something. My, my, what secrets are you keeping?”

I grit my teeth. I should probably just shift back, but I still want answers from Hastur. The King in Yellow sent this monster to terrorize me the first time I visited the World of Glass. She used it to prepare me for my encounter with the egregores. Is this another test from Hastur? Do I need to beat the deimovore at its game again for Hastur to answer my questions? More ridicule, more barbs, more needling at my suffering. But maybe that’s what I deserve for being such a coward about the resolution I made last time I faced it.

“Maybe you want this,” the deimovore muses, lacing her hands behind her back and leaning in. “Maybe you need it. The catharsis, the flagellation, the reminder of what you really are. I can help. I helped last time, didn’t I?”

I flinch. This thing can read me too well. Fuck it, I don’t need this right now.

I conjure a shifter and move to activate it, but before I can, the fake Rachel raises her hands, eyes wide, and shouts, “Wait! Don’t!”

I pause. Tilt my head. “Don’t? Why not?”

The deimovore hesitates. I toy with the shifter. With a groan, it claws at its hair—at my hair, thank you very much—and pleads, “Please, I want to talk. Just hear me out.”

I return the shifter to flame, but I keep my expression cold and stony. “Tell me why I should. You tortured me. I’m going to need a pretty good reason to have a civil conversation.”

“I’ll do anything,” the other Rachel says bluntly. “I’ll take any form you ask and beg however you like. That’s how serious I am. I would have taken Sophia’s shape, but I know that’d just piss you off. Please.”

My curiosity is piqued. The offer is tempting, but more interesting is the stink of desperation to the monster’s plea. “What do you want, fear-eater? You aren’t getting any new terror out of me. Surely you have better prey to chase.”

“If only,” the deimovore snarls. She turns away from me and starts pacing around the shop, her ethereal feet passing through the ash of the ritual circle without disturbing it. “That’s exactly the problem. Do you think I enjoy an existence spent wandering aimlessly in search of a passable meal? I can’t leave the World of Glass like my cousins. Instead, I’m forced to experience the pleasures of your world every time I feed, bombarded with the memories of food that I can’t eat, movies that I can’t see, air that I can’t breathe. I can’t smell the flowers of your world, can’t walk beneath your sunlight, can’t taste a fucking churro. Do you know how badly I was craving a churro after I drank your memories? It’s agony.”

“So what?” I mock. “Why should I—”

It clicks. The monster wearing my face glares at me in hunger and loathing. “Figured it out, have you? I need your fire. I need your magic. If you can transform that brat into something with spine, you can transform me into something capable of leaving the World of Glass. And then I’ll be free of that whore god’s cage! Free of my wretched, unloving maker and this prison of a dimension. Freedom, Rachel. That’s what I crave.”

I smile thinly. “Well, this is exciting leverage, but you haven’t explained why I should care. Making every magical girl in Visage get on their knees and call me ‘Mommy’ doesn’t seem quite worth unleashing you on Earth. It’s a pleasant visual, don’t get me wrong, but I have a very vivid imagination; I don’t need your help to get off.”

The other Rachel rolls her eyes. “I know you’re just saying that to get a rise out of me.” She returns to pacing around the bookstore, but this time she changes as she moves, taking a new form every time I blink. Agatha, Kira, Radiance. In a regal voice, Radiance says, “Surely you can see the advantage of a shapeshifter ally. Whatever you’re doing with that cabal of women, you’re doing it under the watchful gaze of those damnable cats. But they’re not expecting me.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. I raise an eyebrow and conjure a ball of green flame in my hand. “You’re suggesting an alliance. Would you do as I say? Abide by my demands, be bound by my limits?”

“Yes,” the deimovore says in a heartbeat, back to looking like me. “Absolutely.”

“I find that hard to believe.” I extinguish the flame and narrow my eyes. “A creature motivated by freedom accepting a new set of shackles? You’d be constantly scheming to get out from under my heel.”

The fear-eater laughs. “What heel? Rachel, I know you.” Then she’s Howl, cocky and grinning, with a vicious glint in her eye. “‘You’re one of the real monsters,’” she quotes. “Did you ever figure out what she meant by that? I did.”

I tense up. “Bullshit you did. You never got a bite of her.”

“Didn’t need to,” she drawls. “It was obvious. You know it, you just don’t want to admit it.” She’s Rachel again, posing dramatically upon the ashen stage with hands spread and head lowered. “We are an empty thing. We are an abyss of yearning, hollow and ravenous. We would sacrifice anything and anyone to secure our happy ending with our sweet, precious beloved.”

“That’s not a monster,” I insist. “That’s what anyone would do for love!”

“If Agatha knew what you were, she would never have trusted you to cast that spell,” says the simulacrum of Agatha standing with hands clasped and eyes wide, voice now soft and clinical. “She’d call you a teleological monster, which is the kind that you are. Every interaction you have with another living soul is measured by the pursuit of ends. Every word, every expression, every conscious shift in body language, all calculated to achieve certain goals. You’re empty, Rachel.” The deimovore smiles. “That’s why I can trust you with my leash.”

I feel a prickling on my neck and under the skin of my arms. I shouldn’t have let it start talking, but now I can’t stop listening. Is that really what I am? “You don’t—”

“Imagine you give me a body and I go and kill thirty people,” Sophia says calmly. “How would you react? Tell me.”

The sudden appearance of Sophia sends a train through my thoughts and startles an answer from my lips before I realize I’ve said it. “What if Sophia finds out?”

Rachel smiles at me. “See? No guilt over the lives that might have been ruined because of your actions, only concern that Sophia might judge you for your actions. So no, I won’t feel confined by your limits or try to wriggle out from under them. The only restraint you’d really ask is that I avoid doing anything that could bring harm or unhappiness to you and Sophia. Keeping away from her, not bringing heat on you, it all falls under that umbrella, doesn’t it? Am I wrong?”

I clench my stupid, trembling hands to stop them from shaking. I hate everything she’s saying—the idea that I’m some empty thing, devoid of morals, in love with the kindest, most caring girl in the world and completely unable to share her perspective. But I can’t deny it. I breathe out. Why bother pretending? Anyone who’s watching already knows what I am. “Fine. You’re right. That still doesn’t mean I can trust you.”

Agatha throws herself forward and presses herself against me, staring up at me with those big, round eyes. “But I’ll be completely at your mercy. You said you can take the spell back at any time, right? That means you can banish me back to the World of Glass on a whim. I want to eat churros and chimichangas and chili fries without worrying if that meal will be my last, Rachel. I’d do anything to keep that life. Anything.” The deimovore cycles through Agatha, Bombshell, Ferromancer, Sweet Tooth, Radiance, and Lilith before settling into the girl who flashed me at the Ossuary, now topless, plush and warm against my body. She smiles at me coyly and licks her lips.

I can’t stop the shiver that passes through me. There’s an animal part of my brain that wants to rip my clothes off and tangle my limbs with the hot girl in front of me, and there’s a deeper, hungrier part that wants to ask the deimovore to turn back into Sophia first. God, it’s been too long.

But I’m not so pent-up that I’m going to let my cunt think for me while dealing with a shapeshifting memory-stealing fear monster. “Change back into me,” I order the deimovore as I push it away. “You wanna make a deal, let’s deal, but I’m not going to let you manipulate me through my fucking libido. Who do you think I am?”

The other Rachel shrugs. “I mean, it worked for Chloe Denning at your sixteenth birthday party when she was trying to steal your mom’s jewelry box. And for Abigail Winters when you were seventeen and she needed someone to write her English essays. And for—”

“Okay, okay!” I am not blushing, I am not blushing, I am not blushing. “I may or may not have a history of doing really stupid things because a girl promised she’d have sex with me if I did. But that stopped when I met Sophia, and I’m not going to be unfaithful to her just because you have the ability to look like her. It’s qualitatively different and frankly kind of creepy.”

“If you weren’t at least a little interested, you wouldn’t have said the qualitative part,” the deimovore says with a wink.

“Not the point!! Big whoop for you, you can look like hot women I want to bang!! Cool party trick!! Are you done??”

I feel like I’ve been spun around in a tornado. Fear, curiosity, calculation, and lust have all melted together into one big soup of confused emotion. That’s probably what the monster was aiming for, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t bring myself to dismiss it entirely and just teleport away.

A shapeshifter ally would be useful. And for the gift I can offer to be worth anything to the deimovore, the leash would have to be real as well. The risk of having its new form taken away would keep it in line.

And, as much as I hate to admit… I like the attention, too. It’s stupid of me, but I like being needed by someone. Even by a monster. Seven years a worthless fucking leech, wanted by no one, needed by no one. Seven years of wishing Sophia would love me like I love her, needing her like I need the air in my lungs and wishing she felt the same way.

I take a deep breath, straighten up, and center myself. The deimovore has been watching me in silence, giving me the breathing room to process everything. This creature’s nature is to needle me, but I think it’s genuine about its bitterness toward Hastur and the World of Glass. It wants out of the cage. I can grant that wish.

What kind of goddess would I be if I didn’t answer this poor supplicant’s prayers?

“I’ll give you my blessing,” I tell the deimovore. “I’ll grant you my power and let you do whatever you like in the real world, so long as you don’t bring suffering to me and mine. And in return, you’re going to help me make a world where Sophia never has to fight again. You’re going to help me kill the egregores.”

“Gladly.” The deimovore answers instantly, its lips curling into a vicious grin that looks unsettingly natural on my face. “You have my word, frozen in glass.”

Something ripples through the air at the creature’s words. I know with strange certainty that the pact she just uttered was not made lightly. “My part, then,” I murmur. Then I look down at the ashen circle and sigh. “Redrawing that is not going to be fun.”

The other Rachel chuckles. “Don’t bother. I’ve been following you since you left the tower, so I heard everything; it needs the proper meaning, right? That ritual circle wouldn’t do anything for me no matter what I drew. There’s a more obvious way to connect us to each other. A more intimate way to pass the spark from your body to mine.”

She’s phrasing it provocatively to rile me up, but I can read her meaning clearly. “You want to bite me again.”

The creature smiles beatifically. “It’s the most efficient transmission vector.”

I briefly wonder if this was all just a ploy to get at my neck again, but I dismiss that line of thinking as nonsense. If all it wanted was a bite, it wouldn’t have sworn an oath. It probably could have grabbed me from behind and bitten me the second Agatha was out of sight. I sigh. “Goddammit. I hate that I know you’re right. Alright, give me a second.”

Got another one for you, Prometheus. This one’s a real doozy.

I project the image of the emerald spark at Prometheus, then imagine it forming inside me and being drawn out through the mouth of the deimovore. To my surprise, I get an immediate sense of confirmation from my power. The green flame flickers to life inside me.

“Okay. Do it.”

The deimovore is on me in an instant, fangs appearing in her mouth. She bites down, one Rachel sinking its teeth into another. Ice shoots through my veins and is met by molten fire rising from my core.

The cold in my limbs, paralyzing me. The lips against my neck, oddly warm as they draw in the heat from my body. Pain that doesn’t feel like pain. Her hands, gentle against my back as she cradles me. I am held and frozen and destroyed, and from that destruction blooms fire and life and a strange, impossible connection.

I can taste the deimovore’s hunger, violent and all-consuming. Obsessive, yearning, ruinous desire. Empty. Hollow. An abyss. A monster just like me. My hopes, my dreams, my fears, my hungers, all bleeding out of me and spreading into her like ink in water. I can’t tell where I begin and the deimovore ends, but in this frozen moment we burn together.

The spark passes, the other me swallows, and red lips are torn from my neck. It feels like the first second after a long kiss, my lungs screaming to take in air.

My doppelganger looks effervescent. She flexes her fingers and stares at them in awe. “Magnificent,” she whispers. She snatches my hand and squeezes, hard.

“Ow, what the fuck?” I wince and shake her off.

The awe on her face only increases. The other Rachel cackles—a better villainous laugh than I’ve ever managed—and screeches, “Yes! I can hurt people! I can finally hurt people!”

Comprehension dawns.  That wasn’t just mental, that was physical pain. The deimovore can touch me now. “Well, shit. Congrats, I guess.”

Other Rachel—I really need a better name for her—giggles to herself. Then she freezes in place, eyes blinking rapidly, before whirling back toward me and demanding, “You met a motherfucking wizard? What?”

“I resent the insistent terminology,” I grumble. “There’s no proof she’s ever fucked any mothers. The wizard part seems pretty real, though.”

Rachel 2—nope, not that one—smooths her hair back and blows out air. “Okay. Okay. Hot damn, girl, you’ve got some heavy hitters in your corner. I think we can actually do this. Is that crazy or what? I thought this was a suicide pact, but we might actually win. And then I get infinite churros and chili fries! Muahahaha!”

I’ve created a monster. “I guess that’s technically a vote of confidence. Anyway, you should probably, like, pick a different face? Also, do you have a name I can call you or am I going to have to come up with something stupid like Demi Vorato? Fake Rachel, so, Fachel? No, that’s terrible.”

“Huh? Yeah, sure. I don’t know, Phoebe for Phobos.” The newly-named Phoebe squints and her hair turns bright blue. Her features soften, which is really weird to watch, and her eyes darken. “Okay! That should be good. And now I’m going to go enjoy the feel of real fucking dirt beneath my real fucking boots! Oh, and you should forget about that stupid promise you made and just tell the girl you like her. Phoebe out!”

I open my mouth to stop her, but before the first word’s left my lips she’s already a hummingbird. Phoebe zips past me and disappears into the otherworld Forks.

“Goddammit,” I mutter. I can feel her spark, which grows distant as she flies away and then muted as she presumably finds a crossing point over to the real world. “We didn’t coordinate any code words!” I complain to no one. Well, to Hastur, probably. “Hey, King in Yellow, are you listening? I’ve made more chaos for you! Gonna reward me for that with an audience, or are you just going to leave me here to stew in my annoyance?”

Silence is the world’s response. An amused silence, if I cared to characterize it, which I do, because I am a petty bitch.

I sigh. “Welp. This is probably fine, right? Yeah. Sure.”

I fly away from the ransacked bookstore. As I fly, I wonder which of the two rituals I did today will come back to bite me harder.

[commentary]

The deimovore has a name now! Say hello to Phoebe, everyone.

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 8th of February.

[/commentary]

I explain some of my thought process to Agatha—leaving out any detail too tied to Mordacity’s existence, but sharing as much as I can—as we explore the Glass-side Forks in search of components and a proper ritual site. I don’t know that either of those are necessary, but it feels right, and at this point I’m mostly going off feeling. To my surprise, Agatha agrees.

“It’s all arbitrary, right?” she says as we steal chalk off the shelves in an empty supermarket. “Greek gods far from their homeland, the egregores bearing Roman names, and a Mythos entity presiding over the whole enterprise. These are ideas that exist in the World of Glass, born of human belief, twisted to serve a purpose. So, as long as we can draw some kind of connection to belief, it should work. It’s like chaos magic.”

I raise an eyebrow. I swallow the chunk of peach I was chewing, which I stole from the grocery section while Agatha figured out which aisle we needed to go down. “Chaos magic?”

“Mhm! It’s this occult tradition from the 70s that got popular with writers for a while. It’s trying to be this kind of universal or underlying system behind all other magic—magic in the occult sense, I mean, so very witchy stuff, all indirect effects and spells so subtle you can justify not seeing any physical reaction. From the chaos magic perspective, power doesn’t come from any one god or symbol, it comes from the belief in that icon. So if something has meaning to you—if you believe in it—then you can do magic with it. I think the World of Glass might work in the same way.”

“Ferromancer described similar principles when she was teaching me how to make better familiars,” I muse. With the chalk secured, we scope out scented candles. “Prometheus likes clay and sculpting, but it’ll take anything that was made in some way. So, I settled on tabletop figures, stat sheets, and Magic cards. It meant more to me than whatever garbage I could cook up in pottery class.”

We keep those ideas in mind as we scout the empty city for the right location to cast our spell. Since Agatha will be the focus of the ritual, it should be a place that has meaning to her. A place that feels right for her transformation.

She chooses a bookstore. It’s a quaint little place, just a few stacks of shelves and a counter. The walls are covered in posters and leaflets. Agatha tells me it reminds her of her favorite bookstore growing up.

We push the shelves—gently, on Agatha’s insistence—up against the walls and clear a space in the center of the shop. The floor is hardwood, thankfully, which makes it easy to start drawing with chalk. Agatha has a steadier hand and a better eye, so she makes the circle while I decorate behind her with signs and sigils. Once the circle is closed, Agatha does the same, starting from the opposite side. We mark a pair of midpoints, dividing the circle into two halves.

“We should each decorate half the circle,” I’d told Agatha in the supermarket as we were planning the ritual. “It’s about making a connection between us, since that’s what I think the spell will need to get the results we’re after.”

Magic: the Gathering has plenty of cards representing transformation and mental alteration, so I draw the guild crests for Simic, Dimir, and Rakdos alongside the mana symbols for Blue, Red, and Green magic. I’m not exactly a Warhammer fan, but spend enough time on any wargaming forum—or nerd spaces in general—and you’ll see it brought up, so it feels appropriate to add the sign of Tzeentch, the Lord of Change. That still leaves a fair bit of space, so I reluctantly call on my greatest shame and dredge my memories for relevant sigils from League of Legends. The symbol of the Void in League—the setting’s most transformative force—is three curved lines and three dots around a triangle shape.

…Motherfucker, that’s just the Yellow Sign again, isn’t it? Those hacks. Whatever, this whole world is Hastur’s playground anyway. Might as well throw it in.

I finish my half first and glance over at Agatha’s work. A few of her symbols jog my memory as something vaguely alchemical, but most of it I don’t recognize.

“I’m going to make contact with Prometheus,” I tell her. “That might take a bit. When you’re finished with the circle, get in the center and concentrate on what you want out of this.”

Agatha acknowledges me with a nod, then gets back to drawing. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and reach for my magic.

Come to me, Prometheus. Let’s make something beautiful together.

Since the moment I became a witch, there’s been a heat beneath my skin and a furnace in my chest. Other people don’t seem to notice it when we make incidental contact, but I can roll around in the snow high up on a mountain and not get cold. That heat burns in two colors like intertwined snakes of light, green and purple woven together but never fusing.

In my mind, I see a workshop. Forge, anvil, and kiln. Tongs, knives, and hammers. The workshop is more lavishly decorated than the first time I saw it; the product of all I’ve fed it. Prometheus, faceless and familiar, greets me wordlessly with a hum of rising warmth.

I need something from you, friend. There’s a magical girl here, and I need to use my magic on her. I need to transform her into what she wants to be. Can you do that?

By design or by necessity, Prometheus can’t speak to me in clear terms. Instead, it shows me visions. I see fire washing over a woman holding a spool of thread. I see her hand slap the fire away. I see a clay doll put into a furnace and bake. I see a human put into the same and run out of it, smoking.

Well, that has troubling implications; my power sees non-mages as less than human. Fascinating. What if Ariadne stuck her hand in the fire willingly? I ask. What if someone took the flame into themselves, bit down on it, and swallowed?

I project an image of coals in the furnace, stirring them until a choice ember is revealed, then plucking that from the flames with tongs. I envision passing that ember to outstretched hands that curl around it. Hands that come to cherish it, connect to it, bind with it.

I’m not trying to attack anyone with this spell. All it’s meant to do is help someone become more like who she wants to be. I want to give her everything she wants. I want her to feel better about herself. I want her to be her best self. I want her to feel good being that self.

I imagine Agatha, gloomy and shy, taking that green ember and brightening. Becoming happier, more confident, more comfortable. I imagine her speaking to the ember and nurturing it with her voice until it nurtures her in turn, transforming her into the version of herself she wants to be. Thread-bearing Ariadne, watching from behind, rests a hand on Agatha’s shoulder and smiles. There’s no reason for them to reject a true, nourishing gift.

The hum of warmth in my chest turns… contemplative, somehow. Constant fluctuation in temperature, as if the fire was debating with itself how hot it should be. Somewhere in my mantle, a pattern is adjusting. It’s working.

There’s another thing, I tell my power, and then I weave a new image. A clay doll is sculpted, fired, and painted by my hands, but it crumbles on my nightstand when I turn in for bed, the green flame streaming into my body. What if it didn’t have to come back to me?

I shape another vision. The ember from the forge is placed in a block of clay, half-shaped. The clay shifts and swallows the ember, and then it glows from within. It transforms into a painted doll, slow and steady, and when I rest for the night it keeps its new shape.

The hum of heat becomes more frantic. Images flash through my mind too quick to follow. Fire. Clay. Fire. Tools. Fire. Hands. Fire. Thread.

The heat settles. The static becomes a clear note. The thread-bearing woman, Ariadne, extends her hands once more, taking the ember and swallowing it. The block of clay is imbued with flame. The woman sits by my bedside, watching me sleep, the spark still burning in her chest. The clay crumbles, its ember expelled.

I understand. Only the gifted can bear this gift. Do it.

The new pattern locks into place. The mantle shifts. The fire flares.

I open my eyes. An emerald spark flickers gently within hands I don’t remember cupping. It feels natural. It feels right.

“Is that it?” Agatha asks. She stands in the center of the completed circle, surrounded by intricate geometric patterns. She’s clutching a Skulduggery Pleasant book tight to her chest—one of the only real books we could find in the shop, with most of the others being jumbled messes of nonsense.

“I think so.” I furrow my brow. “And I think I know what to do with it. Are you ready?”

Agatha nods. “I know who I want to be. I know what I need.”

I grin. “See you on the other side.”

I drop the spark onto the edge of the circle and watch it ignite. Green flame travels the length of the circle in an instant and flares from every symbol, then moves inward across the lines and angles drawn by Agatha. When it reaches Agatha, the flame swirls around her legs and crawls up her body like a hundred writhing serpents.

Agatha doesn’t flinch. She grits her teeth, squeezes her eyes shut, and takes a deep breath. The book in her hands catches fire. It burns, and when the flame burns out it leaves behind green-black ash and an emerald spark shimmering in Agatha’s hands.

She raises it to her lips, takes the spark into her mouth, and swallows.

A vision burns bright in my mind of two hands intertwined. One soft, bound in thread. One rough, stained with soot. An ember is passed and kindled.

The circle of chalk extinguishes, every symbol reduced to ash. Green flame burns beneath Agatha’s skin, glowing inside her throat and spreading down her chest and within each of her limbs. Agatha laughs, eyes wide and bright.

And then time stands still. Agatha is frozen in joy, illuminated in emerald. A yellow cloak drapes itself across my shoulders and a fathomless presence pushes down on me.

“Well done, Rachel,” the familiar voice of Hastur croons in my ear, soft and mirthful and terribly pleased with herself. “This is an excellent first step. Yes, this is exactly the spice my script has been missing. Allow me to reward you in the manner you desired.”

I’m as frozen as Agatha, unable to move or speak, which is the only reason I didn’t scream when I heard Hastur’s voice. The untouchable nightmare god is back, she’s interested in me, and she wants to reward me, and I’m not sure which part of that I should be most terrified about. Maybe all of it.

Then my body starts moving on its own and it’s suddenly very clear what should be scaring me. My hand raises, extends, and then all my fingers but the ring finger curl in. A rose that wasn’t there before twists itself into a circle around that digit, then tightens. Thorns pierce my skin, sharp and painless. Blood stains my hand. My chest seizes, my eyes go wide, and I cough up rose petals. Petal after petal after petal, hacking and wheezing, until red and pink are the only colors I can see.

“Claimant to the seat of Venus, you are recognized. Whether you rise or fall, know that I shall find your struggles very, very entertaining.”

The King in Yellow laughs, her golden cloak fluttering through the rose petals, and then she’s gone. The petals and thorns go with her, though I can still feel a twinge in my finger and an uncomfortable ache in my chest.

Agatha doesn’t seem to have noticed anything, which doesn’t surprise me. She’s laughing and twirling in the ashen circle, the green glow fading as the magic integrates. I can still feel the spark, dimly, pulsing inside her. I’m confident I could reach out and reclaim it, which is good enough for me; testing that theory would mean having to do the ritual all over again, and I’m not sure it would work as well a second time.

I try to hide any sign of what I just went through from my expression. Agatha doesn’t need to know about what I’m planning, or my encounter with Hastur. Luckily, I have mountains of experience hiding my emotions.

Internally, I’m freaking out. The pain and terror were one thing, but being recognized as a “claimant to the seat of Venus?” Does that imply “Venus” is a title rather than a name? I mean, it sounds like my plan is working, but that phrasing is peculiar. And do I have Venus powers now? Are there other claimants? Will we recognize each other on sight?

Agatha interrupts my train of thought by leaping over and hugging me. She buries her face in my shoulder, squeezing me. For a moment I freeze, but then social scripts take over and I hug her back. She’s very pleasantly soft.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “I feel incredible.” She pulls back from me and does another twirl, eyes shining. “I feel like I can do anything. Monsters? No problem. Supervillains? As if. Egregores?” She stops in place, meets my gaze, and grins. “They won’t know what hit them.”

I grin back. “Venus will regret ever trying to manipulate us. We’re going to burn her kingdom to ash and steal her golden crown. We’ll show them, Agatha. We’ll show them all.”

She squeals and hugs herself, still an absolute dork despite her fresh perspective. “Gosh, this is good. This is like my anxiety meds times a billion. I was expecting to feel a little more confident, but this is amazing. Can I—how long can I stay like this? Does it have a time limit? Will we need to like, recast the ritual every week or something?”

“Nope!” I chirp. “Normally my transformations go away when I sleep, but I carved an exception for this spell. I think, though I may be wrong, that this should last until I take it back. Oh, and you can probably end it yourself? Not sure of the exact mechanics, but it literally shouldn’t be able to do something to you that you don’t want, so if you don’t want the transformation at all, it should either come back to me or just, turn off until you want it again. Might have to experiment. If you have any problems, text me something weird. Ask me to read Umineko.”

“Okay, but you should do that,” she says playfully. “And hey, maybe you’d pick up more girls if they thought you knew how to read.”

I blink. “Did you—”

Agatha covers her mouth, eyes going wide. “Oh my god,” she says, voice muffled by her hands. “It made me snarky. All my heroes are snarky.”

I burst out laughing. “Fuck, that’s great. Now we gotta keep it.”

It only takes a second for Agatha to join me in laughter, and nearly a minute for us to wind down and recover. When we do, I conjure a shifter and hand it to Agatha.

“Head back without me. I’ve got one more piece of business to take care of before I leave the World of Glass. I’ll be fine.” I need to wrangle Hastur and get some answers about this “claimant” business.

Agatha nods, smiling. “‘Kay! I’m already excited for tomorrow’s stream. Oh! I’ll spend tonight practicing so the change looks more natural if the Jovians are watching, which they probably are. See you then, Arkie.” Agatha frowns. “Am I a nicknamer? I’m going to have to experiment with that one and collect more data.”

You dork, I think affectionately. “See you then, Aggie.”

“That sounded way more natural,” Agatha complains as she heads out the door of the bookshop and takes flight.

I watch her go. I’m not sure if I just did a good deed or something insanely selfish, but I suppose time will tell. So long as I get closer to my goal, does it matter?

I consider that question seriously. Does it matter whether I hurt or help Agatha? I’m not sure. Sophia is such a kind and caring person, but Striga is a blade that cuts without hesitation. If she thought it would lead to killing Venus, how would she really feel about manipulating Agatha like this?

Maybe I should ask her.

I imagine that scenario: eager, needy Archon telling her beloved Striga all about her plan to get rid of Venus. Would I be scolded and put in my place, or would I be congratulated for my initiative and brought in on more of Striga’s own plan? It could jeopardize my game if Striga disapproves, but should I really disobey if Sophia thinks I’m in the wrong?

But Sophia doesn’t have perfect information. She’s missing pieces of the puzzle, and that’s my fault. Although…

Imagine how grateful Sophie would be if I killed Venus for her. What a wonderful surprise that would be, if I helped her. Killed for her.

If I saved her, like she saved me.

I giggle. Yes, that would be ideal. I just need to stay the course. In a sense, delaying my confession has actually helped me; what better confession gift than the head of a god? I just have to kill Venus and I’m guaranteed to win Sophie’s heart. Then I can tell her everything.

“Okay, Hastur,” I say aloud. “Are you going to come down and chat, or am I going to have to go hunting?”

“You won’t find her if she doesn’t want you to,” my own voice mocks me from behind. “To the King in Yellow, we’re just ants crawling in the dirt.”

Cold fear spikes down my spine. I whirl, gun in hand, and press it against a perfect replica of my own forehead. My own face stares back at me, facsimile lips twisted in a smirk.

“Hello again, Rachel,” says the deimovore.

[commentary]

Welcome back, deimovore. I’ve missed you.

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 8th of February.

[/commentary]

By now, everyone on the team—with the exception of the Morrigan—has visited the Spire on the other side of reality. Both available levels of the tower have been scoured for information by everyone with a remotely relevant ability. The second floor has another Spire, of course, but that one’s protected by a magic seal instead of a boss monster. The seal is actually pretty similar to what’s on Jupiter’s prison, according to the scholarly types, so Herbalist is studying it to see what can be gleaned before we make any serious attempts at cracking it open.

The second layer of the otherworld Spire is a vast shopping mall where every single product is tied to a magical girl or witch.

In the food court, every burrito, sandwich, and noodle meal bears the name of someone in Visage. The Starbucks only carries their themed drinks. McMemento has gone from an item on the menu to the name of the chain. Every sit-down restaurant in the mall proudly boasts of being owned by Radiance.

The Lego store has an Agatha cutout. The jewelry stores are all branded after Memento. Pearl Princess gets three different makeup franchises. Glamour has a clothing chain.

The weeb stores carry their usual stock, but it’s all been mahou-fied. I could buy matching Kira Kira and Sweet Tooth body pillows or shrimp ramen with Mako on the cup. There’s a line of Agatha figurines that are actually quite tasteful, but the nearly-naked Narcissa figure has way bigger tits than the real thing. Glamour headlines an ecchi manga right next to a clingwrapped hentai DVD starring Maenad. Just a few shelves down, there are Dusk & Dawn slice of life stories and a Sonata idol manga.

But it’s not just Visage on the shelves.

The game store does have a few Visage titles—a dating sim with all the girls, Sonata rhythm game, Pearl Princess dress-up—but those aren’t the big ticket items. Play the hit new Call of Vanguard shooter title where you blast baddies as a new Vanguard recruit—you get to make your very own magical girl, and the back of the box encourages you to think about how you could earn the eye of the Jovians to make your very own contract. Firewatch gets a tower defense game. Legionary headlines a hack and slash. There’s a squad shooter, four player co-op, where you play as Invicta’s team, the one that Thunderclap is on.

A few Coterie members show up in that store, but they’re far more common in the toy store—present among the plushies, but absolutely dominating the tabletop section. Wavecaller and Sister Nature share the cover of a roleplaying game about committing ecoterrorism in a world where pollution is a sentient force of evil actively trying to destroy the Earth through its corporate proxies. Lilith and Harlequin get a game about being horny queer teens that are also literal monsters. Minotaur headlines a TTRPG with percentile dice that seems to mostly be about rolling on absurdly large tables.

We wander from shop to shop, Agatha taking her glasses off periodically to scan, but we don’t really find anything new. We take a breather in one of the clothing stores, which leaves me staring at Striga merch with hungry intent.

Strix Striga does not, in the real world, have any official merchandise. There’s plenty of bootleg garbage, but Vanguard has no interest in producing anime figurines or branded hoodies. So the Venus-produced merch lining the shelves is the nicest I’ve ever seen, and I want it very badly. The crop top and skirt patterned to look like a slutty Halloween version of Striga’s armor would be a very funny gift to buy for Sophia. The perfect replica of her owl mask could be a nice souvenir for my second apartment. I saw a few Striga figurines in the weeb store and Striga plushies in the toy store and I desperately need all of them.

The panties with “Strix” on the back and “Witch Slayer” on the front are tempting in another way but I think I’d die of mortification if Sophie ever caught me, ah, using them in the manner that I would. But, like, if I only wore them in my second apartment…

Agatha is holding up a perfect copy of her corseted dress and frowning at it. She’s been reserved and withdrawn since the meeting.

“What’s on your mind?” I ask her, reluctantly putting down the Striga panties.

“It’s nothing,” she says, then immediately corrects herself. “Okay, it’s not nothing, but I’m not sure if it means anything. I was wondering if our depictions here represent how Venus sees us or how the world sees us. This place harvests ‘meaning’ from the thoughts and actions of everyone in Forks, but it’s also some kind of reflection of Visage and whatever Venus intends for that organization, I think.”

“The first floor definitely felt like it was being presented by Venus,” I muse. “The amusement park version of Visage, the company on its best behavior. A propaganda machine that you have to pay to see.”

“Exactly!” Agatha sets down the dress. “This is the second layer of the propaganda machine. Venus is using the ideas of magical girls to sell magical girls as products, and those products sell new ideas nestled inside. Buying the merch is buying into what it represents. Letting Venus tell you what to think, what to believe, who to trust, and who to admire. A machine that convinces people to become magical girls, or witches, so they can spread her influence further.”

“So what idea is she using you to sell?”

Agatha sighs. “That’s been the question on my mind.” She picks up a shirt showing a chibi Agatha dropping a stack of books as she trips over herself and cries. “I mean… look at this. It’s all like this. Dorky Agatha. Cutesy Agatha. Protect the Agatha. Pat the Agatha. I’m not a hero on any of it. It’s infantilizing.”

So what does the Venus-constructed Glass-side Archon merch say about me? In nearly all of it—games, toys, clothing—I’m depicted alongside another Visage performer or someone outside the company, fangirling over them or sweeping them off their feet. In others, I’m a fan on my phone or on the computer, admiring magical girls from afar and chatting with other fans. I’m outgoing, I’m accessible, I’m fun. I’m an uncritical celebration of the system that created me, and that could be you, too, if you caught the attention of those funny magic cats.

Well, it’s a perception I’ve encouraged, so I don’t mind it. But is it useful beyond infiltration? Is that a cluster of ideas that I can transmute into usurpation of divinity? Love, beauty, and adoration. My impression of Venus is that she’s happy to wield love, but she doesn’t really feel it herself. Could my obsessive desires be a stronger, purer form of love? Could I tap into the adoration of the masses more directly? Could I wield the fires of transformation to be more beautiful than the goddess of beauty?

Those are long-term plans. Right now, I’ve let the silence stretch and I need to prod Agatha again before it gets awkward. “It’s easy to see why you wouldn’t like being infantilized, but there’s more to this, isn’t there?”

Agatha sighs again. “Of course there is. Let’s… walk and talk. Maybe we can pick up something from the food court before leaving, since this was clearly a waste of time.”

I had some of the others confirm that the food in the tower isn’t poisoned or enchanted, and that it’s unlikely to become either of those things. Howl was annoyed at me for eating those delicious, scrumptious churros with Agatha—or possibly just jealous that she didn’t get any herself—but turns out my theorizing was correct! Or at least, Striga and Herbalist ultimately agreed with my reasoning and their magical scans checked out. I think I caught Striga on the verge of rolling her eyes when she learned what I’d done, but alas she didn’t scold me for taking the risk.

As we stroll through the endless corridors of the shopping mall, the voice of Yokohime Rin chimes pleasantly over the intercom, encouraging us to visit various shops and spend more money. Buy gifts for your friends and family! Buy gifts for yourself to feel less lonely if you don’t have any friends or family! A new pair of earrings will fill the hole in your heart. Depression can be easily counteracted with sufficient intake of cinnamon sugar.

The form of the Visage mascot follows us on the screens of information terminals and advertisement boards, stalking us through the mall as her voice blares from above. The background chatter of shoppers is ceaseless, but just like in the amusement park, no one else is around. Without the animatronics, this place feels even emptier.

It takes Agatha a minute to find her words. I can see her visibly struggling with it, so I leave her be until she’s ready. Finally, with effort, she says, “I hate the idea that they might be right about me. That I’m not really a hero.”

I raise an eyebrow. “You’re actively working to save the world under the leadership of the greatest hero to ever heroism. You’re one step removed from Strix Striga, invited to a secret conspiracy with her approval.”

“But I’m nothing like her!” Agatha bemoans. “I’m too soft, too weak, too conflicted. I want to be a hero so badly, but I don’t have what it takes. The fate of the world is at a stake and I’m here struggling to—to flirt? To pretend I like girls? To act with any amount of confidence? This is the stupidest mental block to have. Everything else in Visage was easy because it was all stuff I already wanted to do, but as soon as I find something I don’t like, I’m useless. I just… what kind of hero am I if I can only wear the mask when it’s convenient?”

“I can help with that!” chirps Venus in a cashier uniform, poking her head out from the Hot Topic as we pass by.

I shoot her, obviously. The bullet turns into a spray of rose-scented perfume, but it’s the thought that counts. “Venus!” I say with a forced smile. “How lovely to see you again. Have you come to surrender so I can rip your heart out and eat it?”

Venus laughs like it’s a joke between old friends as she steps out of the shop and skips over to sling her arms around our shoulders. Agatha stiffens while I roll my eyes. “Maybe later, you cad. Right now, we need to talk about darling Agatha! Oh my heavens, you’ve been in quite a state, haven’t you, dearie? Don’t worry, Venus can make it all better.”

Agatha shoves Venus off, steps away, and whirls on her with grimoire raised and a fireball forming. “I will never make a deal with you, so don’t even try.”

Venus smiles. With a snap of her fingers, the fireball extinguishes. As Agatha stares at her spellbook in shock and horror, Venus says, “Ah, but you haven’t even heard what I’m offering, darling, or what the price might be. Would a true hero turn away a weapon in a time of need? It would be awfully selfish of you to continue handicapping your team just to avoid a bit of sacrifice, don’t you think?”

Agatha flinches. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s obviously not true!”

I can tell Agatha feels an ugly grain of truth in that speech. For a goddess of love, Venus is quite vicious with her words. Maybe that shouldn’t surprise me; I know better than most how much love can hurt.

“You’re still so weak,” Venus sighs. “You know, the heroes in all the stories you admired—Valkyrie Cain, Peter Parker, Harry Dresden—would never have joined Visage in the first place. They wouldn’t have forsaken the righteous path for fame and money. And when doomsday came calling, they would do whatever proved necessary to save the world. But you, Agatha, are still a coward. You do what’s easy and run from what’s hard. But you don’t have to be like that anymore. I can help you. I can bring out your best self. You can be like your heroes. You can be brave, and charming, and full of the confidence and willpower to do what needs to be done. You can stop running, Agatha. You just have to take my hand.”

The mall darkens as Venus speaks until the only light pours from the egregore’s golden eyes. All other voices fall silent, the chatter and announcements banished by their mistress. The cashier uniform melts away, replaced by a flowing dress of purest white. In this moment, her hand outstretched, Venus embodies the goddess she claims to be.

I almost think Agatha will take the deal. Her hand twitches, and I can see the torment written across her face. But whatever else she is—coward or hero or both—she still knows better than to trust a thing like Venus. A lesson we’ve all learned, I suppose, after our respective encounters with the Jovians.

“No,” she says, voice clear and loud in the darkness. “I won’t do it. I abjure thee, you horrid beast. Begone!”

The darkness recedes, the mall chatter resumes, and Venus chuckles. “Well, can’t blame a girl for trying. Later, losers.” She walks back into the Hot Topic, white dress turning back into a cashier outfit, and locks the doors behind her.

Agatha slumps as soon as the doors lock, her brave face going away. “Let’s just get out of here,” she mutters. “I think I’ve lost my appetite.”

Not yet. I can’t squander this chance to steal Venus’ thunder. I nod and conjure the shifter, then pause. “Hey. If it wasn’t Venus making that offer—if it had been someone you trusted instead—would you have said yes?”

Agatha frowns at me. “What do you mean? What are you getting at, Archon?”

I hesitate, though only for effect. I made up my mind the moment Venus started talking. “I’ve been working on something. Just an idea, really, but I think I’m ready to test it. I think, if I do it right…” I conjure my green flame, look Agatha dead in the eyes, and say, “…I could transform a magical girl. I could do what Venus was offering, only with no strings attached. But you’d have to trust me.”

A myriad of emotions cross her face in rapid succession. I see calculation, hope, and concern. “Is that even possible?”

“Anything is possible,” I insist. “Think about what Lilith can do, Herbalist, the Morrigan—all of them have figured out that the constraints on our powers are not absolute. This is the same.”

Agatha bites her lip. “What exactly would we be doing? You’re talking about transformation, but this wouldn’t be something physical, would it? We’d be changing my mind.”

I need her to say yes. If I can convince Agatha to do something right after Venus failed to do the same, I’ll be more Venus than Venus. My first step on the path to usurpation. I just need Agatha to agree, and for Prometheus to cooperate, and to avoid accidentally doing more harm than good with the resulting spell. Easy.

“You’ll be the one making the changes,” I tell Agatha. “I’ll provide the power, but the will should come from you. In theory, you could become more like your ‘best self,’ as Venus put it. The ideal version of you that lives in your head. The hero you wish you could be. Confident, determined, unconcerned, whatever being a hero means to you. And if anything goes wrong, I can just take my flame back and any changes should be undone.”

Agatha looks away from me. I can see the pain and need etched into every inch of her, but then she relaxes and it all fades away. “Maybe it’s immature of me to want to be like a character in a book. Real life is more complicated, right? It’s messier, uglier, and there are never guarantees that the good guys will win in the end.” She turns back to me, suddenly smiling. “But I still want to believe in heroes. I want to be a hero. Let’s do it. Make me live up to my name.”

[commentary]

what could possibly go wrong?

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. THAT MEANS NEXT WEEK THERE AREN’T ANY CHAPTERS! ABSENCE! VOID! NONE! NADA! ZIP! ZILCH! ZERO! A BIG FAT GOOSE EGG, GANG! A LITTLE LATE ADDITION TO THE NUMERICAL SYMBOL CHART FROM OUR FRIENDS IN ARABIA!

[/commentary]

“I still feel so bad about yesterday, I’m really sorry about that. I didn’t—”

“It’s fine,” I assure Agatha. “I get it, I promise. Honestly, you’re not wrong to feel a little weirded out by all this. I mean, professional actors work with intimacy coordinates for scenes that are arguably less intense, if more… conventionally physical. Don’t worry about it.”

It’s the second week of January. My next date with Sophia is just a few days away and it’s all I want to think about, but tragically I have “responsibilities” now. I’m sitting with Agatha in one of the Spire’s many lounges, waiting to be called in for a performance review with Radiance and Memento.

Since joining Visage, I’ve been developing Archon’s brand as the ultimate obsessive fangirl. Most of the time that just means getting excited over products with Visage performers on them and doing my monthly clip show, but there’s also the storyline that I’ve been cultivating with Agatha. It’s a way to bolster both of our followings—the fights might be scripted, but they still get shared wider than anything else Visage produces—and it has, to be blunt, not been going smoothly.

Agatha can fight and banter just fine, but she can’t really play along when it comes to the flirtation that’s so essential to a plotline about the wicked witch pursuing the innocent heroine. Frustration, antipathy, coldness, all that she can do, but she never blushes in that way where you can’t quite tell if she’s just embarrassed by the situation or secretly likes it. Her breath never catches when I lean in as if for a kiss. She’s always so tense when we fight, and that influences her body language in ways that the savvy viewer is going to notice. In filthy weeb terms, I’m trying to sell a yandere on tsundere relationship, and Agatha’s giving me all tsun, no dere.

I admit, I still enjoy our fights. Agatha’s cute, and she gets even cuter when I’m tying her up, pinning her against a wall, or getting right up against her and whispering in her ear. She might not flirt back, but she makes adorable noises whenever I land a hit on her.

There’s an argument to be made that I shouldn’t enjoy that as much as I do. For Agatha’s discomfort, sure, but really I just feel guilty about having fun with another girl while I’m finally getting to go on dates with Sophia. It feels wrong to experience any amount of attraction toward another woman. Though, I do wonder what Sophia would think about bringing over a girl for us to tease and play with together…

Okay, I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now, I need to focus on managing Agatha’s feelings. By acting sympathetic to her plight and understanding of her situation, I can secure her continued loyalty—or friendship, I guess you’d call it if you weren’t an edgy weirdo with Borderline Personality Disorder. Regardless, my own desires are mostly irrelevant.

Agatha’s been sitting quietly while I daydreamed, but as I turn toward her she blurts out, “It feels gross. I feel gross, doing this. The fact that this is a thing we do at all.”

I arch an eyebrow dramatically. “Oh? In what sense? You don’t mean…”

The magical girl pauses for a second, then blushes bright red and waves her hands around in a panic. “Not because it’s gay! God, I just realized how that could be interpreted, that’s not what I meant at all. I’m not like. That’s not. I’m straight, but—I don’t think lesbians are gross! Oh, just kill me now.” She buries her face in her hands and groans.

I can’t help but laugh. This girl is way too cute. I love a sopping wet cat. I file away her orientation, which I wasn’t expecting but probably should have guessed? I mean, most people are straight, but spending most of your time in queer circles means you encounter a disproportionate number of other queers, and that’s surprisingly held true for most of the magical girls and witches I’ve interacted with, I think. Maybe the King in Yellow has a thing for lesbians—or is one. Homosexual Hastur mashing her magical girl dolls together.

“Relax,” I comfort Agatha. “I didn’t think you meant it like that. Though, I have to admit, I’m a little curious if doing those scenes is any worse because you know I’m gay.” I pause, then add, “I don’t think I’ve told you that explicitly, but fucking everyone clocks me as a big gay homo lesbian after one conversation with me, so, I figured you knew.”

Agatha relaxes, lets out a tiny giggle, and raises her head. “I might have had an inkling, yes. Maybe in another world that might have made it worse, but, I mean…” Agatha hesitates, biting her lip. “Sorry, I’m trying to think of a way to say this that doesn’t sound, um, bigoted, I guess? It’s… there’s some weird cultural stuff at play, so, preemptive apology. Sorry.”

I snort. “Please. If you can get through it without calling me a slur you’ll be doing better than most of the conversations I’ve had about my sexuality.”

Agatha winces. “Ouch. That’s… wow. Okay then. Well… I guess, when you flirt with me in a scene, there’s a part of me that has this learned aversion, but it’s a small part. Because I know you—because I can tell that your eyes are on someone else. So I don’t feel like I’m actually being pursued, so I’m not ‘in danger’ or anything. It’s the situation, not the interest.”

Ah, she’s talking around Striga. The Jovians know that I have a crush on Striga. Agatha also knows that I have a crush on Striga, or at least she’s probably guessed as much from the way my eyes linger in our secret meetings. The innocent Agatha who only knows Archon through Visage, however, wouldn’t have a clue about any of that. It’s a layer cake of “I know that you know that she knows that I know,” where everyone knows I’m madly in love with Striga but nobody can talk about it openly without exposing the whole game.

I wave for Agatha to go on, keeping my expression placid and understanding. She recovers a bit more of her confidence and rambles on, “It’s about the culture, I think. The expectations. The lying. And I know that so much of what we do is—is ‘kayfabe,’ I’ve heard it called. But the fights are an honest lie, in some sense; everyone watching us go at it knows that we’re not really going to hurt each other or try to kill each other, because that would be bad for business and it’s all just pretend. But the flirting. The hinting and teasing. The…”

“Yuri baiting,” I supply with a grin.

Agatha cringes at the name. “Yes, that. There are fans online—lots of them, thousands of them—who talk about it like they think it’s real. Threads speculating about secret relationships and reading into everything we say and do. And that’s a success, right? We want people to think that it could be real, because that gets the fans more invested in the dynamic. So it all ends up feeling… manipulative, I guess. Like we’re deceiving them into thinking we might actually become a couple, in real life, outside of the ‘kayfabe’ of our work as entertainers.”

I consider what approach is best here. I should try to be supportive, but I think Agatha has seen too much of my more mercenary side to believe that I’d actually take umbrage with being manipulative. On the other hand, going full Mordacity and spouting off about the intrinsic deceptive elements of all communication would probably just get me a weird look. I need to demonstrate that I’m on Agatha’s side while maneuvering her toward thinking more like me. Because I need to think more like Venus; that’s how I’m going to kill her.

Before I can settle on an approach, one of the upper floor secretaries pops her head in and lets us know the meeting room is ready. We head inside.

This office isn’t as nice as the one I went to for my first talk with Visage brass, but I was expecting that. It’s a pretty normal dedicated meeting space. Nice table, decent chairs, a widescreen. And hey, no giant rock hanging over the table like a Sword of Damocles, so definitionally not the worst I’ve seen.

Radiance looks the same as ever—rich, stylish, clad in rainbow white—as she waves us in and gestures for us to sit anywhere. Memento is seated across from her and smiles at us as we enter.

Where Radiance could be mistaken for a high-fashion business aristocrat, Memento cultivates a more fantastical presentation. Her ornate black dress is embellished with real gold, and gemstones of onyx and ruby orbit her gently, kept aloft by her magic. Memento, the “Underworld Heiress,” has a pretty obvious power: Hades, lord of all the riches of the earth. It’s her control over precious metals that keeps the orb levitating above the Spire.

Reach and profit. Appeal to their interests, get close, and figure out which of them we need to brutally murder.

I’ve interacted with Radiance a few times by now, but I only met Memento very briefly during orientation. For Agatha, I imagine the opposite is true. Of course, I’ve seen Memento plenty of times on stream.

“Archon,” she greets warmly. “It’s good to see you again. Are things going well?”

“It’s been great!” I say cheerfully, taking the lead. “It’s been, what, two months? Best two months of my life, honestly. I’m really looking forward to that Magic stream next week.”

Getting Memento to agree to that stream idea will probably go down as my proudest accomplishment in Visage. The cheer in my voice isn’t even injected, I’m genuinely excited to play a stupid card game with someone I’ve fangirled over in chat—even if I have to kill her later.

“Of course,” Memento says. “And don’t worry, I’ve been practicing. Agatha, how are you? You started up a new visual novel, right? Umineko, I think it was called?”

Agatha was looking nervous as she took her seat, but she brightens immediately at Memento’s questioning. “Oh, yes! I’ve wanted to read through it for a while, it’s got a really interesting premise. I—well, I won’t bore you with the details, but I think it’s going to be a really fun few months of streaming. My, um, audience has been really excited for this one.”

“That’s wonderful! Well, shall we get right to it?” Memento glances at Radiance questioningly, who nods and taps away on her laptop.

“Let’s,” Radiance says calmly. “I’d like to be clear up front that both of you are performing at or above the minimum on all the metrics we care about. Please dispel any anxieties about being dressed down or facing punitive action. While we do have notes for improvement, they will be offered purely in the spirit of mutual benefit. I hope this can be an enjoyable and productive conversation for all of us.”

I would comment on how this management style compares to my previous jobs, but I’ve never had any previous jobs, so all my expectations are from media. Radiance and Memento seem nice, as bosses go, which tells me basically nothing; anyone who’s been in the influencer game this long has to get good at hiding their true feelings.

We go over our ventures. Radiance highlights my monthly roundup as an excellent discovery tool that the main Visage channels will signal boost, and suggests making it twice monthly instead. Memento updates Agatha on the progress of negotiations with the Lego people. Agatha and I are both hitting the niches we expect to be popular with, and we’re making enough money through subs, donations, and merch sales to keep the company happy. There are a few brand deals to arrange and some notes on viewer engagement, but overall, we’re doing well.

Then we get to the real pain point.

“I’m of the mind that we’ve already used and overused this space,” Memento says, talking about the yuri bait storyline. “It’s been a mainstay and it’s drummed up excitement in online spaces, but quite frankly I’m not sure there’s much to be gained with more of the same. It’s not growing our potential audience; it’s creating competition within the existing audience.”

Radiance purses her lips. “I disagree. Market research has Archon polling very highly with LGBT members of our audience—higher than any other talent in the early stages of a shipping push. I believe that could be leveraged to pull more eyes away from the indie scene, drawing in fans who want bold, textual interest.”

“We could engineer a leak,” I offer. “Something to connect a private account to me that demonstrates I’m genuinely a lesbian in my personal life. Normal etiquette on social media forums like subreddits is to suppress that kind of information, but it’ll be there for anyone who wants to find it, which could generate word of mouth buzz in the communities we’re targeting.”

Radiance hums and types something down. “Good initiative. I’ll run it by the team. There is, however, a more pressing issue.” Her attention settles on Agatha, who almost manages not to squirm in her seat. “If the dynamic is too one-sided, there’s a risk of turning viewers away. The audience subset we’re specifically trying to court will notice if there’s no promise of potential reciprocation. We need more out of you, Agatha. More fluster, less stonewalling.”

The magical girl hesitates. “I… I understand. I was talking about that with Archon, actually, just before you called us in.”

“If it’s uncomfortable for you,” Memento says with sympathy in her voice, “we wouldn’t want to force you through it. It’s still early enough that we can find someone else to play the part, and you can settle into a more natural dynamic when you collaborate with Archon.”

Polite and benevolent, but the message is still clear: do the job or get out. “I think finding a natural dynamic could actually help the shipping push,” I pipe up. “We’ve got great chemistry when we’re hanging together outside of scenes. I’ve got a few lighter things planned for this month—pranks on the Minecraft server with Glamour and Sweet, for one—and I think a lower stakes environment will do a lot to help.”

Radiance nods. “Reasonable. We’ll have to see how it plays out. It’s my understanding that you’ve secured an invite to Maenad’s upcoming party, is that right, Archon?” I nod back and she continues, “It’ll be quite the event. If Agatha can sell her role, the party will be a perfect opportunity to cement your dynamic. Consider February your deadline, then. I believe that will be all.”

I say, “Of course, and thank you for your time.”

Agatha mumbles her own thanks. As soon as we’re out of sight, she sags. “That was awful. What am I going to do?”

I pat her on the shoulder. “Hey, don’t worry about it right now. We’ve got time to figure something out. I think what you need is to get back in your element.” I pull out my phone and shoot a quick text to Ferromancer as I lead Agatha to one of the Spire balconies. When I get an affirmative response, I conjure a shifter into my hand and hold it out to Agatha. “Let’s get some real detective work done, yeah?”

Agatha grins and grabs the device, and then I take us back to the World of Glass.

[commentary]

gosh radiance and memento seem like such good hashtag allies. dontcha love rainbow capitalism?

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]

The morning after my first date with Sophia finds me perched atop the Visage Spire like a bird of ill omen, leaning over the edge of the roof of one of the tines. I’m still thinking about my last conversation with Mordacity.

How can I kill a god? I asked.

Mordacity gave me an answer: cut it, claim it, or consume it. Each egregore considers itself the “rising god” of three domains or aspects. Mars is war, bloodshed, and the clash of ideals, while Venus is love, beauty, and the adoration of the masses. To kill Venus, I’ll need to turn her aspects against each other, usurp dominion over one of them, or somehow devour her whole. Mordacity voted for consumption, the ravenous wretch.

However I’m going to kill Venus, I need more power first. I’ve learned the secret of my mantle: it’s just a pattern containing other patterns, etched into glass and dreams. It can be altered. It can be stretched. I just wish I could do more.

You don’t have the time for it, Mordacity said when I asked to learn wizardry. You need the training wheels.

My limitations frustrate me. Sophia is fighting a war and I’m not strong enough to save her, and the one power that could do it is beyond my reach.

I want to be with her. Those precious hours at the aquarium were wonderful and incredible and not even close to good enough. I need more. I need my Sophia. And that means I have to lift the world from her shoulders before it buries her.

I flex my fingers and conjure a green fireball of transformation magic. This pattern is the shaper of clay; it’s the Prometheus that created life. It can transform objects, animals, and nonmagical humans, but it can’t affect witches, magical girls, or familiars. I tested it extensively with Ferromancer and Bombshell. We all have limits like that. We all have restrictions on what we can make into our familiars.

Those limitations are lies. All limitations are lies. Everything is just patterns.

I need to convince my magic that it can work on other people that have magic. It shouldn’t be that much of a stretch; I can transform Ferromancer’s arcane technology and Agatha’s book of elemental sorcery. With the right justification for Prometheus—the right alteration to its patterns—I should be able to exert my will on a magical girl and transform her.

The trick is going to be finding volunteers for my experiments. I could go around hunting freelancers like the Blurs, but that’s frowned upon by Visage and I’m trying to be a good little wageslave for my corporate overlords. I’ve asked Ferromancer—tried to extort it out of her, more like—and she refused quite strongly, which I found quite rude.

Maybe I can work on Agatha some more. I told Pandora that I was interested in learning how to steal a human heart and shape a human mind, and I meant it. Friends, coworkers, partners, they all change each other in little ways. Quirks of speech that spread memetically. Interests learned from others. Opinions regurgitated and internalized.

When I was first testing out Prometheus, I tried to learn pottery. I tried to craft things with my hands. But I don’t think that’s who I am. I think I’m meant to craft with language. If I can change how someone thinks, acts, speaks, is that not equivalent to sculpting a lump of clay?

My phone alarm goes off, shaking me from my brooding, and I swoop down from the heights of the Spire to one of its many upper floor entrances. My destination is inside.

I stroll through the halls of the Spire, still mindful of everything I learned from Mordacity. That secretary, those number crunchers, the HR lady, any of them might have magic outside the system of mantles. Chosen of Venus, practitioners of forbidden arts, seekers of secrets.

I’m going to go crazy with paranoia if I suspect everyone I meet of being a wizard.

Kira Kira and Sweet Tooth are already waiting in the recording room when I get there, though I made sure to be a little early. It’s a lounge space prepped for filming, with a big couch and a long table framed nicely by Visage memorabilia in front of a professional camera setup. The table is overflowing with snack food and soft drinks.

“Archon!” Sweet Tooth greets me cheerfully. She bounces out of her seat and bounds over to pull me inside. I kick the door closed behind me. “Hey girl! So good to see you again, oh my gosh, you’ve been killing it on stream. You’re looking great! Hug?”

I hug the pastel witch warmly before taking my perch on the near side of the couch. “Thanks! It’s good to see you, too. Last time was, what, middle of December? I’ll never be able to thank you enough for sponsoring my application. Working at Visage has been a dream come true. Hey there, Kira.”

The starlight witch grunts, her attention entirely focused on her phone.

“Kira. Kira!” Sweet Tooth crosses her arms and glares at her partner, which is more adorable than intimidating thanks to all her frills and sparkles. “Kiki!”

Kira looks up, annoyed. “Oh, don’t you dare. We’ve still got like five minutes before we even need to start setting up for the stream.”

“Mhm, mhm, and you’ve decided the best use of that time is reading the patch notes for Elden Ring, is that right?” Sweet Tooth plops down between me and Kira and leans over her girlfriend’s shoulder to read her phone.

Smugly, Kira says, “I have, yes. Would that your time could be so productive.”

Sweet turns back to me with a roll of her eyes. “Please ignore her. And hey, thank you for talking to Radiance and taking the job! I knew you’d be a great fit. Didn’t I say that, Kira? Kira?”

Kira sighs dramatically and throws her phone onto an empty seat cushion. “Yes, fine, you said that. C’mon, babe, she’s already in the org, you don’t need to lay it on this thick. Archon’s chill, right?” She shoots me an expectant, almost pleading look.

“As chill as the Boreal Valley,” I say solemnly.

“See?” Kira gestures in my direction. “This is gamer-to-gamer communication, sugartits. You wouldn’t get it, since you’re not a gamer like us.” I resist the urge to cringe, knowing she’s playing this up to antagonize her partner.

Sweet Tooth throws her head back and groans. “Oh. My. Gosh in fudging heck, you absolute bitch. Minecraft is a real game!!! I know where you live!!!”

The duo continue their banter while a manager lays out some of the topics Visage wants us to bring up during the stream—as well as some of the topics that should be absolutely avoided, like anything to do with Echidna’s movements and the Sekiu disaster. We’ll all be expected to fight alongside Vanguard and Coterie when the Catastrophe surfaces for real, but until then Visage doesn’t want any of its idols fucking up the messaging. The official line is that Visage entertainers provide much-needed hope and comfort in uncertain times. The unofficial line is that no one in the organization—except maybe Agatha, the poor dear—wants to stick their neck out until they have to.

And then, prepwork completed, we go live.

The point of a “mukbang” or social eating stream is to recreate a sense of community for those who either lack friends and family to eat with entirely or just don’t get to see them often enough to have shared meals as a regular social experience. In theory, it’s a way to bring people together and make them feel less lonely. In practice, there are a whole lot of problems with the typical mukbang—excessive food waste, encouraging eating disorders, and the inherent flaw of trying to replace genuine social connection with the parasocial relationship between streamer and viewer—even before you point out the preference for watching attractive women do the eating. There’s an element of vicarious dating to the whole experience that might make a more delicate sort uncomfortable.

To me, it’s just another vector to manipulate my audience. If they want to feel special, I’ll make them feel special. And in return, they’ll become mine.

“Mm, these are pretty poggers,” I say through a mouthful of dried mango slices. “Chat, who here likes fruit snacks? Tried anything like this? What are y’all eating?”

Sweet Tooth pops a macaron in her mouth, makes a pleased noise, and waits until she’s swallowed it to throw one at her girlfriend and say, “Kira! Kira, you’ve gotta try these!”

Kira catches the treat with admirable reflexes and nibbles on it between bites of strawberry biscuit sticks. “Yeah, okay, that’s not bad.”

“Not bad!?!? Your taste buds are dead! Your tongue is made of lead!”

“Not bad means it’s good!” Kira insists. “It’s a seven out of ten, that’s at least worth buying for sale price! Chat, back me up.”

We wash down our starting snacks with a round of drinks: three flavors of ramune—peach, blueberry, and pineapple—and several cans of guava nectar.

“So how was everyone’s Christmas?” I ask. “Do anything fun?”

“Eh,” Kira says at the same time that Sweet Tooth nods her head emphatically. Sweet glares at Kira, who rolls her eyes.

“We visited my family!” Sweet says. “Big ‘ol Christmas dinner with the works, and we did presents! Under a tree and everything, which was super nostalgic.”

“I never refuse free food,” Kira adds. “Your folks were alright.”

Every performer in Visage has to carefully navigate their interpersonal dynamics with the people in their lives, including other performers. Kira Kira and Sweet Tooth are girlfriends; that’s something I’m completely certain of, no question about it. Their interactions on stream hint at that relationship, but they can never say it outright. If their relationship was public, then they’d become less desirable to a lot of Visage’s audience. That’s not even a gay thing, because more conventional idols in Japan get dragged across the coals if it ever gets out that one of them has a boyfriend. On the other hand, they can definitely get away with being more openly flirtatious and have it be dismissed as just girls being girls. Still, there’s always a limit.

Kira and Sweet’s solution is to play up the friction between their perspectives. Sweet is bubbly and sentimental, Kira is cynical and insincere. Kira’s a hardcore gamer, Sweet barely plays video games. In reality, Kira was probably on her best behavior visiting her girlfriend’s family, but for the sake of the facade—the kayfabe that they’re not dating—she paints herself as an uncaring glutton.

“So what did you get up to?” Kira asks me after another round of banter with Sweet.

“Oh, I stayed home and caught up on everyone’s stream vods. There were so many delicious clips to harvest for my December roundup video.”

That was, in fact, most of what I did during the week of Christmas. After I chickened out on confessing to Sophia, I threw myself into my Visage work and didn’t let up until the weekend.

Of course, I’m not saying that to be honest; Archon’s appeal is that she’s the fangirl. I’m just like you, lonely nerd watching this stream. Kira and Sweet spending time together is aspirational, but staying home alone watching streamers is probably more accurate to the median viewer experience.

We cycle through more of the snack spread, transitioning into potato chips, roasted seaweed, and corn puffs.

Sweet Tooth devours the chips. “We have got to visit Japan again,” she insists to Kira. “Importing this stuff is such a pain! I can never get all the flavors. And we can say hi to our overseas seniors! Archon, you should come with!”

Kira goes for the corn puffs. “I wouldn’t mind hanging with Ryu again. Oh, we could go to that really good wagyu place in Akihabara.”

Don’t mention the maid cafe, don’t mention the maid cafe, don’t mention the maid cafe. I sigh wistfully and say, “I’d love that. I’ve always dreamed of meeting Ryu-senpai in person.”

When the last of the spread is gone and we’ve exhausted our list of topics, Sweet Tooth maneuvers the conversation to a natural stopping point and leads us into sign-off. Once the camera stops rolling, she sprawls out on the couch and pats her stomach with a contented sigh.

“That went well!” she chirps. “Man, that food was good. Best part about magic? I don’t need to watch my weight anymore.”

Kira snorts. “Yeah, I’m gonna put flying, never getting sick, and immortality above that.”

My attention sharpens. Today’s gig is work for Visage, but it’s also work for the conspiracy; this is my chance to get in closer with these two and suss out if either of them is a direct pawn of Venus. “Personally,” I say lightly, “that’s all pretty good, but I’m living for the attention. I could skip meals with enough of the crowd screaming my name.”

It’s what a disciple of Venus would say, or the kind of person that can be convinced to become a disciple of Venus. A devotee of the adoring masses.

Kira laughs me off and returns her attention to her phone. Sweet Tooth, on the other hand, perks up. It’s not a big change, but I’m used to studying a much less emotive face than hers. Her eyes brighten, the corners of her mouth twitch, and she shifts toward me just a fraction of an inch.

“I feel the same way!” Sweet gushes. “I mean, like, I know people online go on and on about ‘parasocialism’ or whatever, but it’s a real rush, right? Knowing you have all those fans that feel such a powerful connection to you? Wanting you, needing you, loving you? The money is one thing, but that’s the real reward.”

“The money’s better at getting me drugs,” Kira drawls. “And getting you clothes, and food, and—”

“Blah blah blah, oh my gosh we get it!” Sweet Tooth rolls her eyes. “Ignore her, please oh please ignore her. You agree with what I was saying, right, Archon?”

“For sure,” I nod. “I mean, I’ve already got basically enough money to live comfortably, and I’m not the kind of person to dream of living in a penthouse or a mansion. But I’ve still got that itch to make my numbers better, to grow my audience, because I love logging on and seeing all those names pop into chat begging for my attention. It’s a power trip.”

Sweet giggles. “The best kind. Gosh, you’re fun. I need to get you in a room with Maenad. I should make sure you have an invite to her party!”

I let my face light up. “Would you? Those always seem a blast.”

“Of course! Oh, not the monthly Jackbox stream, she’s already booked her roster for January. But! She’s hosting an in-person party! Sometime in early February, I think. I’ll make sure you get the deets; she always trusts a referral from me.” Sweet Tooth preens and flutters her eyelashes. “It’s going to be so much fun. Most of the girls should show—definitely all the girls you want to know—and Maenad brings the best drugs and booze. Prepare to get absolutely wasted, bestie.”

I grin. “Sounds like my kind of party. I’ll be there no matter what.”

Got one. I’ll have Agatha find an opportunity to check with her sight, but I’m fairly confident that I’ve just found a follower of Venus.

[commentary]

god im hungry after writing this chapter. give me money so i can buy japanese snack food

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]

The Mary Brandon Aquarium was the only aquarium in Forks. Its exterior was clean, modern, and boasted of its many exhibits on colorful banners hanging from all sides. In the summer it would be as busy as any other major tourist attraction; in early January its attendance was at a yearly low. Sophia considered its selection of aquatic creatures to be quite adequate, though its informational placards were lacking.

She had visited the aquarium with Rachel 397 times in Hastur’s loops, but this would be the first time they had ever gone together in real life.

Sophia smoothed down her skirt and adjusted her book bag. If this were a loop date, Sophia would be wearing a low-cut top and a short skirt to tease Rachel and get her eyes wandering. Here in the real world, with the Jovians guaranteed to be watching, Sophia couldn’t afford to tease her beloved. To maintain the mask of innocence—the fiction that Sophia did not desire Rachel like Rachel desired her—she couldn’t treat their evening like a date. That meant sticking to a long skirt and a comfy sweater over her shirt.

I look like a librarian, she lamented. Of course, librarians are very brave and heroic members of our society who perform a vital civic service and there’s nothing wrong with looking like one or being one, obviously, and it’s a little silly to stereotype librarians as dressing conservatively when the sexy librarian trope is a thing, but what I’m really trying to get across is that Rachel will only want to ravish me a normal amount in this outfit and that’s really disappointing for our first date. Not that this is a date.

Athena pulsed noncommittal acknowledgment, its attention more on the task that Sophia had given it: scanning their environment for potential threats. Each person visiting the aquarium or taking a walk in its vicinity was analyzed for body language tells and checked against the list of witch and magical girl civilian identities that Sophia had spent most of ten years accumulating.

If the Jovians sent someone to disrupt her date, Sophia would see it coming.

“Sophia! You’re here!”

She turned around in surprise at the sound of Rachel’s voice. She’d swept that direction previously to feed its data to Athena, but she hadn’t been expecting Rachel to come from that way; their apartment was in the opposite direction. Did something cause her to take an alternate route? Had she been getting something to eat before their date? Was she spending time with her other friends again, like on Christmas Eve? No, that didn’t make any sense; Rachel should have been completely consumed by excitement for their outing. Maybe there was a clue in Rachel’s appearance as to where she’d been. If Sophia would just let Athena use its gifts on Rachel then—

Sophia refrained from hissing out loud or twisting her expression, but internally she visualized smacking Athena with a newspaper. No! Bad superpower! Don’t even think about it.

Whatever her reason for coming from an unusual direction—an incident only noteworthy because of how few times she could remember it happening in her loops—the important part was that Rachel had arrived. Her beloved was here, and now they could go on their date together. Not a date.

While Sophia had carefully crafted her outfit to dodge any accusation of dressing up or dressing for attention, Rachel was her polar opposite. Sophia’s adorable roommate was wearing a band shirt that bared her shoulders and a thin slice of stomach—more when she raised her arm to wave. Skinny jeans hugged her legs—accessorized with a few belt chains—and she completed the look with fingerless leather gloves. In a true rarity, she was wearing a full face of makeup. Black lipstick, of course.

Rachel always dressed up like that when they went out in the loops. It was like a suit of armor for her, projecting a tougher, more confident self. Daring people to look at her so they wouldn’t look at Sophia. Even after learning about Striga, those Rachels still wanted to play the part of Sophie’s knight in shining armor.

Rachel’s eyes betrayed that mask: bright and shining, full of earnest enthusiasm like a puppy being let out for a walk. A hint of mischief and roguish charm, certainly, but that only added to her cuteness. No matter how cool she tried to act, she’d always be that hopeless romantic who looked at Sophia like she was the sun.

Sophia’s heart ached. In that moment, she wanted nothing more than to bury her face in Rachel’s hair and smell her shampoo. To kiss her until they couldn’t breathe. To take her hand and run away together.

But she couldn’t. Just as Striga could never remove her mask of ice, Sophia could never forsake the mask of innocence. To break it would doom them both.

The innocent Sophia liked having Rachel as a friend, and was happy to go on a friendly trip to the aquarium, like friends did. She enjoyed Rachel’s company, but only in a platonic way, of course, and she’d never even consider that their evening might be interpreted in a more romantic light. Sweet, innocent Sophia Lane probably didn’t even know what sesbian lex was and certainly had no desire to push Rachel into an alley, shove her fingers down those tight pants, and make Rachel moan until her legs were shaking.

Just two friends visiting the aquarium. Platonically. Not a date.

Sophia smiled warmly and waved back as Rachel approached. “Right on time! I’ve got our tickets already, so we’re good to go straight inside. That’s a good look on you, Rache. I feel like I haven’t seen you in an outfit like that in ages. God, maybe college days?”

Rachel preened at the compliment and did a little twirl to show off. “Something like that. New year, old me, right? You look great, too, Sophie.”

Sophia looked away shyly. “Aww, thanks. But I feel kind of underdressed next to you.”

“A Sophia is never underdressed, nor overdressed,” Rachel intoned. “She dresses precisely as she means to.”

Sophia giggled at the reference. She had fond memories of watching Lord of the Rings with Rachel after one of Rachel’s friends, Mordacity, sent them a pirated copy and insisted they watch the whole trilogy in one sitting. Rachel stuck it out through Fellowship and Two Towers, but fell asleep during Return of the King. Sophia got to enjoy Rachel leaning on her, dozed off with the cutest expression on her face, for nearly two hours.

“Let’s head inside,” Sophia said, and then she added with gravity, “We musn’t keep the fish waiting.”

“Perish the thought. Look out fishies, here we come!”

Over the course of 397 aquarium dates, Sophia had perfected her path through the structure for optimal enjoyment of both parties. They would start slow with the sea floor exhibits, visit the otters for a jolt of cuteness, and then channel that energy into petting some rays. After that, looking at sharks and eels would provide a nice breather before the grand finale: the illustrious jellyfish room.

There were many people who might struggle with an itinerary that strict, but Rachel was very good at doing what she was told—at least when it came to Sophia.

They went inside and made their way past beautiful coral formations, anemone clusters, and basking sea stars. Sophia had a genuine interest in ocean life, but most of her attention was on Rachel, and she knew Rachel’s attention would be on her. Rachel had been deprived of quality time with Sophia for so long that she’d be desperate for scraps of attention. Sophia was very precise in her messaging, knowing all the right things to say and do to make Rachel as happy as possible without signaling romantic intent.

A smile that’s warm and friendly, but not too intimate. Lots of eye contact, but never lingering. Fleeting touches on shoulders and hands. Sophia had constructed a list in her head of the correct body language to use with Rachel, all of it calculated to be as positive as possible without crossing the line into something outwardly flirtatious.

She hated it. Despite being very, very good at it, Sophia hated manipulating people. Especially Rachel. Everything would be so much easier and feel so much better if she could just speak honestly, tell everyone what she wanted from them, and have them all listen to her. And she knew that if she could just tell Rachel how she really felt, she’d never have to manipulate her like she did her fellow magical girls in Vanguard or the witches she secretly worked with. Her beloved would trust her. Her beloved would do as she asked. Her beloved would be her perfect partner if only they could be together.

Sophia wailed in her head, imagining herself banging on the walls of a padded room. God, I’m pathetic. I’m drowning in gay pining over a girl who likes me back while we’re on a date in an aquarium. Over a girl I’ve had sex with in a simulated time loop! What level of useless lesbian am I on? What is my life?

They went to see the otters next. Furry little critters with adorable noses that looked so cute when they yawned, but Sophia’s attention was, of course, more fixated on Rachel. Sophia had been through this experience hundreds of times, but this was Rachel’s first. It was always Rachel’s first, and that was what kept it feeling so wonderful each time.

While Rachel crooned over the furry babies, Sophia swept the room for threats. The employee watching over the otters and fielding questions seemed safe. The woman passing down the hallway didn’t match any face in Athena’s database.

The man leering at Rachel’s ass needed to be covertly murdered and disposed of, but she would have to do it in such a way that the act couldn’t be traced back to either of her identities. The modern surveillance state hampered such crimes, but she knew every blindspot in Forks. She’d get him alone, cut his throat, and carry his body discretely up to the mountains where it could be fed to a bear. Her greatest obstacle would be the Jovians mobilizing one of their pawns to catch her in the act. To preempt that outcome, she’d have to—

I’m plotting the murder of a random civilian. This is not conducive to my goals. Murdering the offender immediately would interrupt her date with Rachel, while murdering him later wouldn’t serve any purpose but petty vindictiveness. The risks involved were too high to pursue such a minor vendetta. Sophia positioned herself blocking the vermin’s eyeline and leaned over Rachel’s shoulder to watch the otters with her.

“That one looks a bit like you,” she teased, picking out a mustelid at random. “Maybe you’re an otter at heart.”

“How dare you,” Rachel said, pretending to be insulted. “If I were an animal, I’d be a wolf. Noble! Fierce! A cunning hunter!”

Domesticable, Sophia did not say out loud. “I always figured you’d be a crow,” she mused. “Crows are very clever, and they have an excellent memory for people they’ve interacted with. Hurt a crow and you make an enemy for life, but help a crow and you can earn their undying loyalty. I admire that trait, and I think it’s one you share.”

Rachel’s cheeks reddened at Sophia’s praise. “Yeah, well, I try. And wings are pretty good, so, sure. Crow Rachel.”

They got through petting the rays without incident, then visited the room with sharks, eels, and octopuses. Sophia explained that “octopuses” was the most accepted term and that “octopi” was strictly incorrect while “octopodes” was technically valid but would probably be rejected by a style guide. In case Rachel ever needed to write a formal paper about octopuses, for some reason—or more likely, in case she ever wanted to be pedantic on the internet.

Sophia kept expecting that one of those dazzling, genius octopuses would turn into an Echidna monster and start rampaging. Rhea would walk in and start talking to Rachel. The Syndicate would attack the aquarium to abduct Rachel. Something would go wrong.

But nothing happened. And then, at long last, they reached the jellyfish room.

It was a dark chamber, its cold luminescence serving to highlight the jellyfish in their tanks and nothing else. The strange, ethereal creatures seemed to float more than swim, drifting through the water, beautiful and mindless. Free of any burdens, made of tendrils and strange texture, colorful and translucent.

“Jellyfish are truly fascinating creatures with an incredible expression of biodiversity. They’re capable of both sexual and asexual reproduction, and their life cycles can feature more than ten stages of development. Imagine looking at ten different animals and being told that they’re all variations of the same species of jellyfish. For every free-floating medusa, there might be a bevy of polyps and larvae.

“Jellyfish are incredibly efficient in their use of energy. They create vortex rings as they swim that continue to push the medusa forward even after it stops exerting effort, like a bird catching a thermal but entirely self-directed. That same movement pattern can bring food to them through the churn of water, and some have a symbiotic relationship with algae that allow for photosynthesis as another energy source.

“There’s a specific species of jellyfish that’s considered biologically immortal due to its ability to revert to an earlier stage of its life cycle. They’re able to move between differentiated cells without an intermediate stem cell phase, which is a process that’s been used in humans to treat diabetic conditions by inducing liver cells to produce insulin. Still, our fumbling with genetics is nothing compared to the immortal jellyfish’s innate ability to maintain the length of its telomeres, which allows it to bypass or ‘reset’ its age on a cellular level.”

Even the aquarium employees couldn’t give explanations this interesting. She should be completely enraptured right now.

Rachel was staring at Sophia with an adoring smile and shining eyes. “You’re so cute when you really get into it like that,” she said, sounding utterly delighted. “I love the way you can get lost in a topic.”

Sophia wanted to kiss Rachel so badly. In a typical loop date, that’s exactly what would happen. She’d get close to Rachel and breathe her in and taste her lips and hold her close. They’d intertwine beneath the sightless gaze of the jellyfish, drowning in each other, until their desire ran too hot and they raced from the aquarium back home to sate their kindled passions.

But she couldn’t do that. To protect Rachel from the Jovians, Sophia was trapped inside the mask of innocence. So she made herself act shy and demure, grateful for the praise but not reading any deeper romantic meaning into it. “That’s very sweet, Rachel, thank you. It’s nice to hear you enjoy my silly rambling. This… this was really nice. I can’t wait to do it again. Next week, next Friday, for sure, okay?”

Microexpressions of disappointment washed over Rachel and were immediately discarded before a typical person would be able to notice them. Sophia saw them all, each one a dagger in her heart. But Rachel kept smiling. “It was really special. Thank you for this, Sophia. I’ve missed spending time with you.”

They parted ways at the aquarium entrance. The moment Rachel was out of sight, the mask of innocence was discarded and the mask of ice returned. Striga wove through the streets of Forks wearing Sophia’s expressionless face, then transformed in an appropriate blindspot. She flew to the nearest Ossuary entrance and was ushered directly to one of the hidden rooms in the uppermost layer.

There, in absolute privacy—guaranteed by oath—Sophia screamed.

“It’s not fair!” She picked up a wooden chair brought expressly to be destroyed and smashed it against the wall. She screamed again. “It’s not fair, not fair, not fair! I hate it!”

She picked up a chair leg and snapped it over her knee. She threw aside the pieces and clawed at her sides, eyes wide, teeth grinding. Her breath came heavy and ragged.

“There has to be a way,” she whispered. “I can’t take this. I have to fix it. I have to win. I have to kill them all and then Rachel will be mine and we’ll be together forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and—”

She gasped for air, a shudder passing through her, and then in a fit of rage she grabbed another chair and slammed it into the ground—and its pieces—until it was a pile of splinters.

“I’ve got it!” she said with a sudden smile. “I’ll ask Herbalist or Lilith for a spell to accelerate my sleep. If it’s only for a month or two, the costs won’t add up to enough I need to worry about. And then, with extra hours every day, I’ll be able to get this Echidna business sorted in half the time. I’ll kill the egregores. I’ll kill the Jovians. And then Rachel will be mine. All mine. Mine, mine, mine, mine, MINE!” Her last word was screamed into the soundproof room.

Sophia slumped. The manic energy bled out of her.

She whispered, “And then my long nightmare will finally be over, and I can rest.”

[commentary]

asa mitaka wishes she had autistic rizz like this bitch

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]