Magical Girl Phantom Ascension

After a long moment of consideration, you decide you're not quite ready to call it a night just yet… and you want to try to figure some other things out as well.

The walk to school, comfortable by day, becomes strange at night. The lights downtown are reflected off lower clouds that recently rolled in, creating a burning citrine glow that bathes the sky but fails to reach the ground; the end result is the dark outlines of familiar homes and buildings framed against the glaring orange. A feral cat dashes across the road, startling you, and you find yourself watching the darkness warily. Your paranoia builds and builds until it reaches a peak, suddenly reminding you that you're likely the most spooky thing in the vicinity... If only it actually felt that way.

Soon enough, you arrive at the school, locked up and dark at this hour. You first spend some time doing a circle of the outside, trying to find any back entrances that may somehow still be open even now, but that proves as fruitless as you knew it would be.

So you return to the front doors, pushing against them and trying as hard as you can to will yourself into intangibility. All you succeed in doing is making strange faces for several minutes, and in the end your wrists hurt from the force you applied.

Hmm.

After a quick glance around to ensure nobody's around to witness, you transform into Magical Girl form and try again, hoping it'll somehow make you more… magical. Unfortunately, this strategy doesn't net you any better results. So you detransform again, and try to focus on your ring. And then you try thinking about the fact that you're dead, and what your grave looked like. And then…

You lack a timepiece to give you an exact number, but it feels like at least an hour has passed by the time you finally give up, slumping down against the door, exhausted. And for the first time today, you let yourself stop thinking. Everything; your death, your new job, the stranger and the reaper, your family, the monster and the man inside, Midori and her strange distress; all of it fades away temporarily. You're tired and sore, but in the brief numbness you also feel… peaceful. Like when you were alive, when your biggest concerns were homework and a particularly tough stage in one of your games, and your perceptions of reality weren't being torn down every five minutes. It's a nice feeling.

When you open your eyes again, you're looking up at the ceiling. You're flat on your back, having fallen through the door, and it's still halfway through your torso. You quickly scramble for purchase and pull yourself the rest of the way through, panicking in fear of a sudden bisection that never comes. Your hands sink a little into the floor as you do this, but there thankfully seems to be a limit keeping you from falling through, and you're able to get back to your feet.

You're in the main entrance area, with several benches and shoe cupboards. Usually lit by sunlight through the high windows, it's unnerving now, the murky darkness impenetrable even to your light-starved eyes. The windows on the opposite end at least provide a trickle of the orange glow from outside, but it does little to help.

After a moment of blind stumbling, you finally get fed up and transform again, (It's almost alarming how, amidst everything else, this is becoming increasingly natural to you.) creating another glowing streamer from your weapon to illuminate the space.

Instinctively, you make your way to your shoelocker, unlocking the combination. It's empty already as you suspected, but you can't stop from feeling disappointed. Fortunately, you weren't in the habit of storing personal effects there like some of your classmates, so you weren't at risk of losing anything, but it also makes you wonder what you were expecting. Maybe a love letter? You quash the thought immediately, mentally scoffing at yourself for entertaining such an arrogant, unlikely notion. You wouldn't even know what to do if you got one, and that was before the matter of your death. You always had your art and dresses on your mind anyway, and it wasn't like anyone else even cared about you to begin with…

The image of Midori staring at you from the back of class flashes to mind, but you immediately quash that too. You don't even know her too well; perhaps it would best to just pretend for now that you heard nothing.

Anyway. You slam the shoelocker shut again, sighing in sudden melancholy. It's still sinking in, but you're closer to realizing the meaning. This is just another reminder that you're not part of this life anymore. Trapped instead in this strange limbo, no longer alive but not quite dead either. An unfortunate limbo with blood-red skies shining through the windows…

"Thinking you lost something, or just feeling nostalgic?" You whirl to find a familiar figure sitting on the bench opposite you. Despite her amused tone, her expression is more downbeat, even pitying. "I'm sorry, for what it's worth. I had no power over the circumstances of your death, but leaving you here like this, even if for a good cause… I didn't think of how much of a torment it must be. The souls I ferry tend to miss home as well, but I suppose it's a blessing, in a way, that they must move on so soon. So for that, I apologize."

A flash of irritation hits you and subsides as quick as it came, and you reluctantly accept the sincerity in her words. "It's… fine. It's better off for everything this way, right? At least my stupid death will have some meaning." Your words sound hollow and you both know it, so you do your best to inject some cheer into your tone. "Anyway, what brings you here?"

Death gives you a concerned look, but soon follows suit in hiding her clear misgivings. "Well for one thing, I wanted to compliment you on your new duds; I didn't get to see them last time." She reaches out to finger the hem of your wide sleeves, where the shiny purple transitions gradually and seamlessly into a translucent seafoam shade, with a cloudy look surprisingly similar to the light trail you created. "So this is what they look like for you. I'm kind of envious, almost." She casts a wry glance at the hellish skies outside. "I could never pull the look off, myself, but I love picking up people dressed with color. Soldiers are the worst with all that drab camouflage, but even outside of that, people tend not to dress their best for dying… unless they got killed at a costume party or something."

She sits back up and clears her throat slightly, suddenly remembering herself. "But that's not what I'm really here about. There's actually something I wanted to ask you to help me with taking care of, just upstairs here. It may be dangerous to even attempt to tackle until you've got more experience, but also isn't too urgent. It would be better to take care of sooner rather than later, but it shouldn't start directly affecting the living world for at least another week or two, by my estimate. Doing it would also be separate from my earlier offer, too; it won't lock you into helping with my other requests, so you could do this and still turn me down on everything else, if that's what you decide. Just wanted to let you know now."

The fact that she seems to be skirting around explaining what the request actually entails has you on edge, but you decide to consider your options.

How will you respond?
> I'll do it now. (Better to get it out of the way sooner than later.)
> Not just yet. (I want to make sure I know what I'm doing first.)
> No, period. (Something smells fishy about this; better steer clear.)