Cherie Magica
- Thread starter Ghoul King
- Start date
- Crossover
Takareer
Words and feathers
- Location
- Ontario, Canada
I really appreciate the way the communication with witches is being done. Even in fanfics, typically you either see "fully sane witch", or "monster". Here it feels like Cherie is going beyond even Kyuubey's understanding. I wonder if he will be interested in having her be a research assistant? Having her be a normal magical girl seems like a waste of this learning opportunity... unless Kyuubey knows the conclusions already, of course.
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
More of your writing; hooray! Thanks!
Oh, dear, I'm sorry about your health; I hope things improve there. And in general, for you.
...Is Cherie getting this wrong? Some research I did just now seemed to indicate they actually aren't.Ghoul King said:
Oh, dear, I'm sorry about your health; I hope things improve there. And in general, for you.
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You're writing of Cherish is the best in any fanfiction I have read in recent memory. You blend the aspects of Madoka and Worm amazingly too.
I look forward to the next chapter, seeing how Cherish is cheating a lot with her power maybe we will see a reverse of a Witch somthing I haven't even seen in a fic before. Or like all things in worm and Madoka it will be a fruitless distraction.
Either way I can't wait.
I look forward to the next chapter, seeing how Cherish is cheating a lot with her power maybe we will see a reverse of a Witch somthing I haven't even seen in a fic before. Or like all things in worm and Madoka it will be a fruitless distraction.
Either way I can't wait.
Omake: Wish Away
- Location
- Wherever
Have a micro-omake thing I wrote up before I got sick and then never got to posting for... several reasons. (Among them: I really wanted to make it longer first, but couldn't think of anything to meaningfully add)
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"Hold on," it occurs to me one day as I'm wandering about Brockton Bay for reasons I can't be bothered to explain to a hypothetical audience, which I'm thinking telepathically because I accepted the puppet's friend request in my brain for reasons not worth getting into right now. "With all this crap with wishes and whatnot, which can do fucking timelines apparently, why not convince someone to just... wish away Scion? Or hell, all the alien whatsits. This seems like a really obvious exploit, man."
The muppet is for whatever goddamn reason hanging out on some rando teenage girl's head. "That would require a truly enormous Potential, such as someone who could strike down a god might have." Then it stares very pointedly at the curly-haired girl it's sitting atop, then very pointedly at the camera-
"No!" I shriek. "Fuck you, I'm not costarring with Taylor again!"
Kyubey sighs. "You're being very unprofessional, miss Vasil."
Taylor looks annoyed. "It's not like I'm a serial killer in this one, Cherie, calm down, you're being unreasonable."
"No!" I punctuate my refusal by stomping the ground. "We're already booked for The Wild Hunt and I'm getting nightmares from that role! You cannot possibly pay me enough to costar with Taylor again!" Thank fuck I'm an unpopular character! I usually get a bit role, or die off-screen, or otherwise get to only briefly interact with Taylor!
Kyubey sighs again. "Please? It'd really simplify this story."
"No, nope, fuck you, hell no."
And then I walk off set while Taylor and Kyubey commiserate about me being a 'drama queen'. Dicks.
That is one of the reasons this 'fic exists, yeah. Communicating with a not-quite-human mentality is an interesting topic that requires thought and care, and then Madoka fanfic either assumes it's not an option or skips straight to the Witches being... not alien at all. Which is boring. So nice to hear This Thing I Explicitly Set Out To Do is going over well.
I didn't research that terribly closely because Cherie isn't meant to be a font of perfectly accurate information, but cliones/sea angels are absolutely predators (Albeit very tiny ones) and for a lot of people they're just cute sea critters that look completely harmless. It's the kind of dissonance that sticks with Cherie.
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"Hold on," it occurs to me one day as I'm wandering about Brockton Bay for reasons I can't be bothered to explain to a hypothetical audience, which I'm thinking telepathically because I accepted the puppet's friend request in my brain for reasons not worth getting into right now. "With all this crap with wishes and whatnot, which can do fucking timelines apparently, why not convince someone to just... wish away Scion? Or hell, all the alien whatsits. This seems like a really obvious exploit, man."
The muppet is for whatever goddamn reason hanging out on some rando teenage girl's head. "That would require a truly enormous Potential, such as someone who could strike down a god might have." Then it stares very pointedly at the curly-haired girl it's sitting atop, then very pointedly at the camera-
"No!" I shriek. "Fuck you, I'm not costarring with Taylor again!"
Kyubey sighs. "You're being very unprofessional, miss Vasil."
Taylor looks annoyed. "It's not like I'm a serial killer in this one, Cherie, calm down, you're being unreasonable."
"No!" I punctuate my refusal by stomping the ground. "We're already booked for The Wild Hunt and I'm getting nightmares from that role! You cannot possibly pay me enough to costar with Taylor again!" Thank fuck I'm an unpopular character! I usually get a bit role, or die off-screen, or otherwise get to only briefly interact with Taylor!
Kyubey sighs again. "Please? It'd really simplify this story."
"No, nope, fuck you, hell no."
And then I walk off set while Taylor and Kyubey commiserate about me being a 'drama queen'. Dicks.
That is one of the reasons this 'fic exists, yeah. Communicating with a not-quite-human mentality is an interesting topic that requires thought and care, and then Madoka fanfic either assumes it's not an option or skips straight to the Witches being... not alien at all. Which is boring. So nice to hear This Thing I Explicitly Set Out To Do is going over well.
I didn't research that terribly closely because Cherie isn't meant to be a font of perfectly accurate information, but cliones/sea angels are absolutely predators (Albeit very tiny ones) and for a lot of people they're just cute sea critters that look completely harmless. It's the kind of dissonance that sticks with Cherie.
Sylent-M
Be Trans, Take to Heresy
- Pronouns
- Was/Were
Is it actually gonna happen? After all this time?!
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
Ah, thanks!Ghoul King said:
I also think it's going well.Ghoul King said:
Chapter 4: Ashes In My Mouth
- Location
- Wherever
The hell- I know these people! It's the spontaneous public performance art crew!... wait. Have... have I been... yeah, fuck, this is the Havergals all over again, goddammit. They weren't running about, improving people's moods by being an entertaining team of actors or something, they've been running around stopping Witches, and this Witch's Kiss crap has been why moods swung up in a weird way around them. Whiiiiich means they're here to kill this Witch. Okay, admittedly that would solve the mass suicide issue and almost certainly get the heat off of me, but I'm getting somewhere with this Witch! I don't want that work going down the drain!
So I try asking the Witch if she can, like, hide herself or something before these people get here. Miss Witch clearly does not understand the question, I don't need to translate her hastily-scribbled one-word response to know that. So probably not. And there's no way I can hide this giant-ass Opera House. Fuck, fine, I'll bail-
-the muppet never taught me how to get out of a Labyrinth. Fuck.
Can I get out? Aside the Witch being beaten up, which worked last time? Holy shit the rat sucks, it really shoulda either told me how to get out or told me it doesn't know a way, whichever!
So I try asking the Witch how I can leave her Labyrinth and- uh oh. The hell? That is a weird melange of feelings, some weird mix of desperate craving like I've seen from addicts and some starving homeless, possessive lover shit, fear of abandonment, and defensive anger like I've seen when adults have tried to take a kid's favorite teddy bear or whatever. What the hell, we've known each other like five minutes and I've not been twisting you to like me way more than would naturally happen! But hey, whatever, I can just tamp down that-
okay it turns out i can't do that trivially and also the familiars are now focused on me
goddammit this was going so well
On the plus side, the clione is apparently still stuck on the stage, I wasn't standing too close to it when this shit started, and the clapping octopi just keep clapping without otherwise moving. Which, hey, creepy! But convenient! On the minus side my powers are still not adequately helping here, and Freestyle Actor Troupe Except Not is... a ways away, maybe a kilometer? Ugh, these Labyrinths mess with my power way too much, I can't trust my gut.
I try one last bit of talking at the Witch, but while the clione nods or shakes its head at me in a reasonably coherent way, the cacophony of feelings it's putting out makes me think it's just trying to stall me, not really listening to me. The impatience, for one. The fact that some of the familiars are putting out that five-year-old 'ha ha I'm so sneaky' dumbassery while drifting our way, for another. (How do they talk, there's clearly some communication going on there but I haven't seen any evidence of what the system is)
Okay so now I have to defend myself with my Magical Girl Powers!
...
What the fuck can I even do? Goes through my head as I eye my stupid criminal-catching stick. I can jump, possibly heal fast, detect Labyrinths with my soul marble, and... uh... holy crap the muppet really did fail to prepare me for this. Do I even have magical fighty powers? The muppet said something about my wish deciding my abilities or something, but that doesn't narrow it down at all. Uuuurgh, okay, uh, let's... finagle one of the familiars my way and... bop it with my stick? Surely this outfit came with the stick for a reason, right?
While I'm wandering to the turtle's edge, wondering how this works and fantasizing about dropkicking the rat, the Witch is getting desperate and scared and darkly depressed. "God, so clingy," I mutter to myself, reminded of some early toys, from when I thought Daddy's style was a good fit to my pow- wait, what? I turn to look at the stage in confusion, baffled by the Witch's switch in its symphony of suffering. Shame, horror, and embarrassment bursting forth to start, followed closely by a hard core of guilt that a weak shell of righteous anger is desperately trying to bury while the shame whistles at the edges, feeding both feelings. The hell? I've heard almost exactly this when someone heard a criticism for the millionth time that they agreed was true and hated about themselves. But... how?... do Witches bitchily gossip at each other? Are Earth Witches just a bunch of outcast refugees whose society exiled them?? What is this?
Fuckit, forget escape, back to talking!
I stalk back to the audience and point accusingly at the clione. "Hey, hey!" No reaction, annoying me- oh right, need to use French. So then I do my best to grab their attention, demand an explanation for why being called clingy bothers them, and do my best to shove away their confusion and otherwise push them to answer the damn question instead of questioning how I noticed their mood. Then adjust my target a bit because their confusion ramping down correlates really damn close to all the musical sealife around us being distressingly interested in me, and lo, letting them have their confusion gets the fishies backing off. (Why???) So that's useful, if confusing. Anyway, after a bit of fiddling, we manage to yes/no our way to the Witch communicating that she does in fact feel called out... but she can't tell me by who. She's very vehement on it NOT being fellow Witches, and in fact it finally occurs to me to ask her if she's ever met a fellow Witch, which gives me a... confused answer. She nods yes, but also no, and when I press she basically gives me a helpless metaphorical shrug. And her 'scape confirms that both answers feel true AND wrong to her. What the hell?
Unfortunately, before I can get any of the answers I most want, the cheery troupe gets in range. Above and beyond my power tracking them at all times, I know they're about to arrive because the Witch starts spiking a tired old feeling of betrayal -an 'oh, I should've known it was a trick, it always is' sort of feeling- and stops cooperating with talking to me, while the sealife stops dithering and starts swirling toward me and/or the troupe. The other other reason I know they're here is one of them squealing, "We're here to rescue you, new girl!" from above and behind me, far enough away it's not earsplitting but still close enough I'd be unhappy to hear it even if they weren't interrupting my study session. Jerks.
I sigh to myself and loudly inform the Witch in my best approximation of a formal apology in French (I know roughly how it goes off the top of my head, Pauline loves formal language and Daddy demands apologies from her a lot) that I have no ties to these jerks and please don't lump me in with them plz and thx. That gets a huffy sort of disbelief and still has shades of the bitter, tired betrayal thing in the background, so I'm pretty sure the Witch is thinking... well, something along the lines of 'I don't see how it can be a trick, but it has to be a trick even though I don't see how that would work'. Annoyingly, at least one of the troupe is apparently close enough to hear me, and probably understand me, because they spike confusion laced with suspicion and sundry other 'maybe this is a bad idea' types of feelings. So probably at minimum they can tell I'm talking to the Witch, and I guess other magical girls don't fucking try talking to the clearly intelligent beings the fucking puppet points them at? God, do other people actually fall for that stupid elemental evil spiel? I feel abruptly exhausted just imagining interacting with the troupe.
That's about when I notice the muppet sitting eerily still in the shadow of The Opera House Witch, red eyes glowing enough it honestly just looks like the eyes are floating alone if I don't squint a little to see the outline of its body. How the hell does its white fur manage to blend into the darkness so well?? Whatever, it's staring at me, back again, and I consider zapping it with -yeah, let's hit it with a big ol' dose of shame! This causes its tail to tick-tock, but it doesn't overtly freak out or leave or anything. Hmmm. No idea what to make of that. But whatever, the puppet can wait!
I (grudgingly) turn around to look at the troupe, sigh to myself as I get eyes on what my power was already broadly telling me about them murdering their way through familiars in acrobatic fashion, and scrutinize them a bit more closely.
Apparent Leader is a short girl in a pretty muted ensemble. Like, I'm put in mind of a man's tuxedo, only if I squint I can tell it's actually a very dark blue, the kind of blue that can look like black in the right lighting or alongside other colors, and there's a light dusting of purple glitter or something that's invisible except when the light catches it just right. There's like absolutely nothing visible of her body below the neck, too, her hands covered by intensely white gloves, the pants meeting directly with leather-looking flats that are a boring brown, and the tuxedo is done up properly instead of showing a little cleavage or anything. She's even wearing a fucking tie!... though the tie is a little out of place, as even from a distance I can see some kind of face drawn on it. I'm going to just call it a 'demonic' face until I can get a closer look; it doesn't look like it's meant to be friendly. Dark enough to blend in with the tuxedo if you're not scrutinizing it, though. Also out of place is the garotte she keeps using to choke the shit out of familiars. (I'm honestly confused as to how that works...)
Apparent Leader's 'scape is kind of interesting, in that she's a Nervous Nellie sort. I was pretty sure of this before I looked at her because there's a lot of ambient anxiety and blips of terror occur regularly in a way that makes me think she's perpetually haunted by thoughts like 'did I forget to turn off the oven?' only actually I mean probably more like 'is that one guy I run into a lot stalking me?' (Actual example btw, there's a dude she runs into a decent amount at random and gets really anxious around. Pretty sure he's not a stalker 'cause he doesn't seem to really notice how often they run into each other), but seeing her in person is pretty strong confirmation; anytime the garotte isn't being used for its proper purpose, she's perpetually wringing it in her hands as an obvious nervous gesture. Also constantly glancing at her fellow girls, making sure they're alright and swooping to the rescue if she thinks they're struggling a bit. She's like a really nervous babysitter, except all these girls look up to her instead of resenting her for taking away the freedom promised by not having parents watching over them. If I'd realized the group wasn't just rando freestyle entertainment artists I would've people-watched this batch just to see this dynamic in action, honestly. (It helps that she's got a cute face; the pageboy cut usually looks bad to me on anyone, but the way it frames her face works well) I'd honestly been previously interpreting her as the oldest person in this group, but she's so short it's making me doubt my long-range assessment, especially with the cute face; looking at her just feels like I've got to be looking at somebody who's not done with puberty.
Maybe Second In Command is much more along the lines of what's in my head when I hear 'magical girl'. Really cheerful (Maybe even annoyingly so), for starters, but also her outfit looks like it's riffing on the general range of a cheerleader outfit with the short skirt and tanktop plus shoes. (No pompoms, though) Mind, I don't believe for a second there's an actual school that approved this design, as the skirt is made of a writhing mess of red and white strips that manages to call to mind tentacled horrors of the deep yet also feel like she'd turn into a human buzzsaw if she pirouetted, the tanktop has no school name or icon or whatever and is just a boring red, she's wielding a couple of those cheer squad stick things (Keeps smashing familiars with them, actually), and why the fuck are the shoes heels? Are those six-inchers? Holy shit, are you trying to break your neck? Cheer squads don't do heels for a reason! But still. Teen girl but cooler, basically, including the blonde ponytail cheerleader thing. I've got a back-of-my-head profile of Maybe-SIC here, but it's mostly just that she's cheerful and helpful and sometimes struggles with depression but never for long and -y'know, I thought she was staving it off by throwing herself into her troupe's routine, but now I know what she actually does I'm a bit confused by it? Does she like battles to the death against unimaginable horrors?... or does she think of this whole thing from some kind of right angle I'll never guess without talking to her? Missing something here...
Third Place is a toy who I have previously played with, who thankfully doesn't seem to recognize me when I'm not crashing at her place and shutting her up with kisses. (I've run into her a few other times; she never recognized me before, either) A Kyushu refugee, she's always looked the part; a little too skinny, hair always looking a bit like dry straw (but black), clothes rarely fitting quite right, and perpetually a little too stressed for her exact situation. (tbh this was part of the appeal; if I could make her stop acting so damn haunted for five minutes, it made my problems feel a little less like they're unbearably heavy) Though right now she's looking pretty slick in a whatsit, that Japanese thingy that I was surprised to learn is actually a unisex outfit, anyway it completely obscures how thin she is, and her hair is pleated or something so well no errant hairs are undermining her look, and even though my power is still telling me that she's worrying she's even got a better poker face for some reason. No idea what the stick with paper bits trailing it is supposed to be about. It sets familiars on fire when she bops them with it, never mind we're underwater, but that doesn't explain how it meshes with the outfit. Eh, whatever, Ky... ana? Oko? Whatever, Ky-something here normally is pretty passive, easily lead around even without power assistance (Her mother isn't a cape, for one), so unless she recognizes me I'm not terribly concerned by her.
Miss The Fourth is dressed the part of a princess. And not like a halloween costume princess or whatever, but the whole shebang; lots of layers to the dress part, kept in that poofy shape by a metal cage (Probably, fuck, who knows with magical girl costumes, I didn't even pick mine it just appeared), ribcage being squeezed into the desired shape by that whatsit I don't remember the name of, sleeves way too long, and carrying a pair of those fancy fans a princess hides her face with. Though. Those don't normally have razor edges, or turn into spinning discs of death when thrown, and certainly don't boomerang back into a princess' hands. Because I'm seeing her from below for the moment, I can also see that she seems to have Cinderella-style glass slippers, and also that the poofy dress thing is more or less completely filled out inside; that looks like it has to be a pain to walk in. It's all intensely purple outside the sleeves and inside the skirt being a clean white, which I have no idea if that actually means anything given the outfit weirdness, but it's certainly a memorable look. This girl I've also got a back-of-my-head profile for, she's going to college, probably got a part-time job outside the troupe (Which, hey, Witch-fighting presumably doesn't pay bills given all the secrecy), she's a broadly sociable sort but in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way where she's happy to hang with friends but is also perfectly comfortable reading a book/watching a movie/playing a video game/whatever it is she does to entertain herself alone. I've never closely scrutinized her before, though, so I'm probably missing important nuance. I like the dreads. Not sure I've seen Princess Dreads as a look before. Feels like a crown or tiara or something would complete the look, but still pretty cool.
Fifthsies is the girl I was most interested in having some fun with if I found the time, because she's spent over a year perpetually seeming resigned but... rarely depressed. Usually that kind of chronic resignation goes hand-in-hand with depression -I'm actually not sure of the cause/effect relationship there, it's so rare to hear exceptions lasting longer than a couple weeks. I've been really curious if it was just a personality thing, or a really weird situation, or a deliberate effort thing, or a power thing (I was mostly sure she wasn't a cape, but only mostly), or something completely outside my experience! Knowing she's part of this whole shebang makes me even more curious -and also makes it really frustrating I don't know what the fuck decides our costumes. Hers is a goddamn animal mascot thing that means nothing to me (Some kind of crab or lobster or something??), but which is WAY more cheerfully-designed than I'd have expected if she made it herself, with the idiot grin and enormous 'innocent' eyeballs and pale pink base color interrupted by little rainbows and hearts and smiling suns and moons and aaaaaa it looks like something Dar' would hug while sleeping!! And I have no idea how this connects to her psych stuff because seriously how the fuck do costumes work?? (Also, being an animal mascot means I can't see HER at all...)
Sixthers looks like she's A Mom in her late twenties or early thirties, which catches me so off guard everything else about her takes a bit to register. (Pretty sure she does have kids, too... I'd been guessing she was an older sibling, previously, but being a mom fits way too well with what I've overheard) Every other magical girl I've met has been in the teen-to-maybe-twenty range that was so typical of that genre before Kyushu killed it, I'd just sort of accepted it as a thing that probably is about the muppet being a creep, but this raises questions! Gaaaah! But here and now, she's in an intensely yellow sundress patterned with sunflower imagery, including a hat that really just looks like she ripped a sunflower's head off and plopped it atop her own head. It's kind of wigging me out, partly because I've always internally called her 'the wilting sunflower' because she's struck me as a broadly upbeat person who folds too readily -I thought she was an older sibling instead of a mom in part because I got the vibe she tends to be talked into doing things by the brats she's riding herd on, which I've overheard plenty from older siblings either being threatened with the specter of parental authority by younger siblings or by the older sibling being unreasonably fond of the younger, but I don't think I've otherwise heard a parent so readily, consistently fold in the face of social pressure from their own kids.
Though the other reason it's wigging me out is that she's hacking her way through the fish and whatnot with a combination of what looks like bloodstained pliers made of bone and some kind of bloodstained cleaver-y thing? Also made of bone? At least, that sure looks like a spinal column for the handle and some probably-not-human skull capping the end of the thing. What the fuck? Where's the blood coming from, the fishies aren't bleeding! Aaaah I wish I knew how to figure out what decides costumes and shit because what the fuuuuuck!!!
The above all being less a direct representation of the words flashing through my skull and more an extended summary of the impressions flitting through my brain for the thirty seconds or so of gaping at these people as they ripped their way through fish and whales and shit and finally landed in front of me.
(One of the main sentences that did actually go through my head was being surprised they didn't share a coherent visual theme or anything; a lady-butler, a cheerleader, a Japanese whatsit, a princess of blades, a crustacean animal mascot, and Gone With The Wind Meets Axe Murderer? What is this shit?)
Ky-whatever is the first to speak up as the troupe lands, loudly announcing, "Don't worry, new girl, we know what we're doing," with a pretty good backing of bravado-y false confidence. Like, if I didn't have my power I might think it's actually genuine. Huh. Would not have pegged her as being able to manage that.
Butler lady the probable leader tacks on, "You're standing dangerously close to the Witch, miss! Please hurry over here!" Wow she really is a mother hen, she's genuinely all worried for me, a complete stranger she didn't know existed until... actually, all of them seemed unsurprised to see me. I'd been thinking they just stumbled into this place through what I'm gonna call 'chance', unfortunate timing for me but just a Shit Happens moment, but this all reads more like they came here to rescue me. Like when the Havergals came along. And blamed it on the rat.
...
Goddammit, muppet.
"I'm fucking fine," I bite out in frustration before remembering that I really ought to be finagling things with my power and natural charm. Like yeah sure it's moderately satisfying to see the troupe clearly balking at this unexpected response, but it's still stupid.
Affirming this is that the cheerleader rallies and declares, "You're a newbie-" Yeah that all but confirms the muppet talked them into coming. "-so it's understandable to be high on your new power-" There's some background embarrassment that strongly suggests she overestimated herself in her early days, and is assuming it of me just off that and not from any experience with other girls replicating it. "-but Witches should never be underestimated! So please step aside while we handle this!" I hate that she's striking poses the whole while.
Siiiigh. Okay, um, I really ought to think of an angle, but honestly I'm still a bit overwhelmed by all this crap? And am really hazy on what other magical girls do and do not know and what they expect others to know? So... truth-y things to lead with and decide maybe-lying or bending the truth as I go it is. So I wave a hand at the clione and very reasonably point out, "You might have noticed she hasn't attacked me, like, the entire time you guys have been doing your thing." Which gets an interesting reaction from the Witch, a mix of pleased surprise (Particularly centered on me saying she, for some reason) and a bit of sit-up-straighter pride plus some covetousness I consider tamping down but I'm not sure what she's specifically coveting so I leave it alone for the moment.
Less interesting (Because it's completely unsurprising) is that the troupe are all pretty taken aback by this response, where it's pretty obvious this is outside the range of possible responses they imagined. Ky-something rallies first, literally turning her nose up, and declaring, "Witches have been known to lull girls into a sense of false security before springing their trap," which hey, miss stage Witch finds that hurtful, big fucking shock!
And rrriiight now I'm more inclined to make nice with the pocket dimension monster I'm hanging out inside of and that was actually being pretty cooperative before these jerks showed up than with said jerks, so I cross my arms as best I can without dropping my stupid criminal-catcher-whatsit and point out, "She's right over there, she can hear you, this isn't even talking behind someone's back." Opera House Witch has a splash of gratitude, while Team Magical Girls are responding with a mixture of 'this girl is crazy' and 'I don't even know how to respond to this strangeness'.
"There is ample evidence that Witches do not speak any human language," slithers into my brain and apparently the brains of the girls in front of me as the muppet steps a bit more into the open. I notice that Miss Mom is the only member of the troupe whose response to the puppet revealing itself is fully positive; way-too-short-leader-girl is wary and upset but doing a pretty good job keeping it off her face, and Peppy Preppy Cheerleader has some background uncertainty lurking behind her enthusiasm, while everyone else is in the vicinity of half-and-half on 'oh cool this person is here' and 'oh great I don't really want this unpleasant person here'. I also notice that the fucking rat didn't say anything about understanding human languages. People tend to think 'speak the language' and 'understand the language' are the same thing, but they're not, and it really stands out how this is like a response to what I said that implies my objection is irrelevant same as saying mean things about an owl right in front of it isn't going to offend it. It's a really artfully-crafted technically-not-a-lie. Sure, muppet, your species doesn't do the lying thing. Riiiight.
I briefly consider pointing this out, but the tones I'm getting from these girls make me doubt they'll buy a logical argument unless I put a serious emotional whammo on them, which is always tricky to juggle with more than about three people and also it occurs to me that magical girls are rocks piloting meatsuits so I'm not sure I want to commit to a plan that relies on my power working exactly as expected. (Like yeah, Courtney was easy to perk up with my power, but I didn't really mess around and do thorough tests of this topic) So instead I gesture at the Witch and ask her in my rusty French to wave hi to the girls. The clione obligingly does so, which Ky-something doesn't seem to notice but the rest of them just stop and do an exaggerated blink one time, weirdly synchronized. So then I turn back to the rat and its patsies and say, "So are you going to do that stupid thing of trying to argue it must've been a coincidence because anything that doesn't look like a human is ~obviously~ too dumb to make sense of words while that fucking muppet is talking to us-" The heat in my voice kind of pisses off princess girl, but the rest of them are getting personal mixes of shame/guilt/ohshitIfeelstupid type stuff, so I'm thinking this is more or less getting through to most of them? "-or are you going to let me go back to speaking rusty French at her and figure out her deal and all?" Miss Witch seems flattered? I have no idea what to make of that, given her English is apparently existent but not terribly good.
Preppie peppy cheerleader surprises me a bit by saying, "Witches kill people," in a really intense way where she clearly has no intention of listening to counterarguments. Though the rising cloud of bitter self-hatred and regrets and so on paints a pretty vivid picture to me -I'm guessing she tried making nice with a Witch and then it ate a friend or relative or whatever and now she refuses to Ever Make That Mistake Again.
I shrug, though. "And humans kill humans, but Canada hasn't had a state execution of a non-parahuman for like thirty years, not even for actual factual serial killers. And the PRT is pretty negative on vigilantes murdering people who don't have a Kill Order on them." When Lifter did his stupid Youtube announcement of his intention to kill Tube Lord, the video got a very public takedown and like a month later he was in one of those mid-tier jails for parahumans who can't be held by a regular jail. This isn't exactly a secret.
Animal mascot girl and preppy pep cheerleader aren't terribly happy to hear what I'm saying but I'm getting the vibe they kind of resigned themselves to 'being bad people' a while ago and adding more guilt is just going to result in longer angsty diary entries later or something rather than a change in their behavior. Butler Leader, Miss Mom, and Princess Dreads are clearly having more of a 'I hadn't thought of it that way' sort of response, like they're not sure I'm right but they're a bit less certain of their own rightness than they were before I spoke. Kiyone -right! That's her name!- is clamping down on some kind of anger? She's the one that speaks up, though, and I actually can't hear the anger in her voice at all, so that's a bit impressive. "Witches can't be dealt with by regular people and are monsters that feed-"
"-On human suffering because they're evil horrible fairy-tale monsters, I'm assuming the rat told you just like it told me?" I interrupt with because oh god I don't want to listen to this idiocy be regurgitated again. Interestingly, only Miss Mom doesn't take a step back at that. And not just like metaphorically; the other five all flinched, took a step back like I'd slapped them, and except maybe animal mascot girl I saw their eyes dart to the puppet. (Stupid full-body costume)
"I do not lie," lies the puppet again. The voice is flat and all, but the fact that it inserted itself into the conversation to object to that piece... interesting. I think being called a liar really bothers it.
Miss Mom very clearly has not noticed her fellow troupe members reacting to what I said, just looking at me and very earnestly saying, "Please, miss, this is already hard, just... step aside and let us work and we'll mentor you afterward. It'll be fun!" The exact lilt she puts on that last bit makes me think she's spent a little too much time recently with itty-bitty kids, like she's gotten too used to convincing brats to go along with something by framing it as a game they'll enjoy. I could be reading too much into it, though.
I waggle a finger at her like I'm an adult telling a kid they're being naughty and they need to stop, doing my best to replicate the expression Toy #3 would put on when she was trying to mom at her kids in the most condescending way possible. (She was fun. An awful, awful mother to her kids, but fun to watch and mess with) "Nah. You fight Miss Opera Witch here-" holy shit that is a big swoop upward in happiness from Miss Witch. Does she like that name? "-you fight me, too, and I'll be honest, you don't want to fight me."
There's a long pause while the six magical girls take in the newbie magical girl the muppet apparently asked them to please rescue, stare at how I'm leaning on my criminal-catcher thing rather than having it at the ready, and mostly they pretty obviously are in disbelief at both the fact that I'm insisting on this and that I think I have a chance in a 6v1. And then Princess Dreads, to my surprise, apparently makes the correct intuitive leap. "She's a parahuman," she says while backing up a considerable distance and bringing her razor fans up in what looks like some martial arts-y ready pose.
Interestingly, they all tense up and back away, even Miss Mom, who mournfully asks the muppet, "Why didn't you tell us, Kyubey?"
"You didn't ask." Wow this is funny to watch happen to others instead of having it done to me! I almost kind of like the puppet for 0.5 seconds! (Though it'd be funnier if Miss Mom wasn't the only one who seems genuinely surprised and hurt -the others were clearly half-expecting this response or something very close to it)
Aaaand then the six girls back even further away and start whispering to each other so I can't hear them, and I'm getting the vibe they're seriously prepping to make that attack instead of leaving and the whispering is so I can't hear their planning. "Hey!" I call out to them. "If you keep that shit up even 5 seconds longer, I'm assuming you're attacking us and I will self-defense the fuck out of you first!"
There's a second where they're all quiet and tense, another couple of seconds where they keep whispering until Kiyone notices me quietly counting down with the fingers of my left hand, and then right as I'm about to bring down my pointer finger and start the whammies they all jump away to the nearest chain and keep on fleeing.
"Huh," I say aloud because why not. "I didn't really expect that to work." And then my cell phone rings. "Oh for-" I sigh, unthinkingly pull out the cell phone before remembering it's in my purse, my purse doesn't exist, and also I'm underfuckingwater, but then it turns out the phone is magically in my hand and keeps on working, so... whatever. I take a steadying breath, paste on my best for-Daddy smile, and then answer the call. "Yes, Daddy?"
"Are you at that college again?" Daddy asks in that ominous way that means 'you better hope the answer isn't yes'. Fuck. What the hell?
"Of course not, Daddy, can't you tell?" I cheerily lie as the first response that comes to mind. I'm underwater in a magic music place with hellfire burning down below, it can't possibly sound like a college. Aaaand then I remember non-magical girls can't sense a lot of this shit and hold my breath, having no fucking clue what Daddy is hearing.
"... thought you hated movie theaters." He thinks I'm at a movie? Oh thank fuck! He thinks I'm at a movie!
Quick quick cover story um um shit oh I know! "I was scoping out a potential, y'know-" An aunt. One of Daddy's girls. But he hates us talking about this stuff in public, and he thinks I'm in public, so circumspection. "-she was really set on watching this movie and I figured it's been a while maybe it's easier?" Daddy is broadly aware I don't do well with TV and shit since I triggered. I don't think he has any idea why and suspect his assumptions have nothing to do with my power making it miserable, but he doesn't care and I'm not interested in cluing him if I don't have to.
There's a pause before Daddy asks, "Is it?" in his 'I don't really give a shit personally but I feel the need to probe your story in case it's a lie' voice, which already tells me he's 98% of the way to letting this go and never asking ever again.
I don't have to act at all when I heave an exhausted, twisted-up sigh and say, "Not even slightly." Because god. This has been a sucky experience.
My power makes it clear the following pause is him waffling whether to press harder or not, but thankfully he lets it drop. "Get home as soon as you can, don't go anywhere near the college, don't draw attention to yourself, there's a PRT investigation happening there."
What the fuck? Okay um- holy shit that is a lot of signatures in the room the Labyrinth entrance is in. Yeah, PRT officers, a couple Protectorate Heroes, and the suicide cult has been shuffled off. The hell, when did this happen, how did this happen, have I really been in here that long? Trying to not sound too distracted, I say, "Got it, I'll be back as soon as I can."
Daddy gives an acknowledging grunt, there's a moment where he clearly considers saying something more, and then he unceremoniously hangs up.
At which point I collapse bonelessly to the ground, sweating. (Miss Opera Witch reacts with middling concern to that, but mostly seems pleased as punch that the other girls are gone and I stood up for her) Shit. How the hell do I get out of this without something happening that can point to me being here? My costume is invisible, but if I appear in the classroom I'll still be visible, and Daddy will get pissy and suspicious if I just wait for them to leave 'cause that'll probably take until nightfall and... fuck... I still don't know how to leave the Labyrinth. I bonelessly roll my head to look at where the muppet was last lurking, and to my surprise it's still there, tail tick-tocking and empty eyes focused on me. "Hey, muppet." I wait a second to see if it responds to that, but nah, not that I can tell. "How the hell do I get out of Labyrinths?"
There's a long enough wait before it responds that I think it's just ignoring me and am about to ask the Opera House Witch when its dead voice pops into my skull. "Labyrinths are entered and exited at their edges if one does not simply defeat the Witch to make the Labyrinth go away." I kind of want to rage at that non-answer, but before I can muster the energy the rat asks, "Why did you not fight the Witch? You need its Grief Seed to survive."
I wonder if it's really trying to ask 'why did you side with the Witch against your fellow magical girls' but for some reason doesn't want to ask it directly. Not sure why it wouldn't want to ask it directly, but I can't get a proper profile on it, and it's maybe an actual factual alien, so who knows, right? After a second, I leverage myself to more of a sitting position, admiring how the Labyrinth is actually very pretty when its inhabitants are largely ignoring me. Then I say, "You clearly either have giant holes in your knowledge of how this shit all works or are actively lying about how it works. Just because you say the Witch eats people to survive and I have to eat Witches to survive-"
"That is not what I've said," insists the muppet as I talk louder over it.
"-doesn't mean either of those are true, it just means you have some reason for wanting me to think it's true. Maybe Witches can, I dunno, eat deer or something like regular human beings." No idea what the alternatives might be for me, mind, but that's why you ask questions and test theories, goddammit.
"Witches require a minimum intensity of emotional suffering-" I sigh at this routine returning. "-to sustain themselves, of which it is primarily humans, particularly human females undergoing puberty, that experience enough suffering to sustain a Witch."
I blink a few times at that, because hold on. "Wait, you mean that literally? Witches eat emotions to feed themselves?" Holy shit have I been misunderstanding it this whole time? Holy shit! The positive response! The one where I shoved despair at her and she liked that! Holy fuck, that actually fits to what it's saying!
"That is what I have been saying, yes."
Then it occurs to me abruptly that the Witch and her Familiars have, like, completely ignored the muppet this whole time. And I think that was true with the last Witch too. And the muppet says it's an alien that doesn't do emotions and- well. I think it's lying, or wrong, but maybe less wrong than I've been figuring? Maybe it feels with less intensity than my fellow non-Pauline humans, and maybe Witches can tell this is so somehow? Fuckit. "Hey, Imma test something real quick kthx," and then I SLAM the muppet with as much despair as I can as fast as I can, to the point I start feeling a pinch in my forehead like a headache might seriously start up if I keep pushing this.
The muppet's ears and tail wilt a tiny bit, so small a difference I wouldn't notice if I wasn't looking for stuff like that, and in fact so small I'm not completely convinced I'm actually seeing it rather than expecting it really hard. The Witch perks up a tiny bit, with a collection of tunes that put me in mind of when I've seen a dog pick up a scent of something it likes but it can't figure out where the smell is coming from.
Huh.
Then I do the same thing at like a quarter the strength but aimed at Miss Opera House Witch, and the clione swoons and hugs itself tightly, looking like it's an effort to stay standing upright, and the entire Labyrinth once again gets sedate and relaxed.
Huh.
"Are you using your parahuman ability? I do not see a test," the muppet obliviously asks and honestly I'm inclined to believe it's not noticing the signs I'm hearing.
I don't bother to respond, instead looking at the clione and doing my best with my bad French to ask Miss Opera House Witch (Yeah, she likes that name) if she can like move her Labyrinth elsewhere (Nod from the clione) and let me get home before my Daddy has a fit. (A sudden surge of sympathy and an earnest desire to help. Okay, the muppet was maybe lying less than I thought, but the 'elemental evil' shit is still crap)
Huh.
Turns out the muppet meant basically I needed to go back to around where I started and then keeping walking further away. Miss Opera House Witch is the 'center' of the Labyrinth, and the furthest bits start to fray at the edges, gaps appearing in the watery view that show glimpses of the regular ol' world I know. (Or, well, in this case, a view of an alleyway) Getting out is as simple as hopping through one of these tears in the Labyrinth's edges. It's both very weird and yet feels very human to me.
With Miss Opera House Witch being in such a good mood, the whole process is shockingly painless after I assure her I'll be by again as soon as I can, which yeah I will because this is fascinating and potentially very, very useful. Imagine conquering Canada with not only the Vasil parahuman clan but also a bunch of literally invisible secret police that can monitor the normies unseen! I suspect a lot of parahumans won't be able to cope with this shit. And conveniently, Daddy and I have the best powers for keeping Witches happy at no real cost! Great synergy, and I'll be assured to be Daddy's indispensable second in command since I can track these things and all. Fuck yeah!
Anyway, the only real hurdle is that for some fucking reason the water is sufficiently water-like that once I'm out of the Labyrinth all of a sudden my hairstyle is ruined, the hair sticking everywhere to my back and shoulders, my makeup is running horribly, and my clothes are a mess. Like, my real non-costume clothes are somehow soaked. Somehow my purse's contents are fine, including the phone, somehow. Fine, whatever, figure it out later. In the here and now it means I need to come up with a good story for why I went to a movie and came back looking like I threw myself in a lake and then walked home.
(Also it means I'm freezing, but only for three minutes before I use my power to convince someone to give me their fur coat without them properly thinking through anything about this situation)
Amazingly, circumstances contrive so Daddy isn't home when I get back. He's off with Jean-Paul doing... not sure... whatever, point is I get back, have Pauline greet me at the door, take in that I'm still dripping water, and nod to herself and remark to nobody in particular that it's good I made it back more than 15 minutes before the point where Daddy told her to punish me for being late. One of the few good things about Pauline: she doesn't notice (Or maybe doesn't care, can't tell) the really obvious weird shit that if Daddy were present to notice would result in him grilling me and possibly figuring out I did in fact lie to his face. I didn't violate an explicit rule or order, so it's all good as far as she's concerned. So I get to shower, reapply the most prominent bits of my makeup, hide the purse and clothes where Daddy won't notice until they've dried enough to not be suspicious, practice my story about this girl Daddy will definitely not actually be interested in (Sorry, Daddy, she's hot and all, but she's enmeshed in a bunch of crap that'll make her hard to pull out and also she has Opinions about movies, including some movies you like, so...), and psych myself up for when he gets home.
Even more amazingly, that all goes perfectly smoothly. There's blips that make it clear Daddy is still wondering if I'm lying about something, but I'm mostly-sure he actually believes I didn't go to the campus and will drop that topic forever if nobody else reminds him.
So when I lie down in bed, it's with an uncharacteristic smile on my face.
(Carefully hidden from Pauline, because she's weirdly good at picking up on the difference between me faking a good mood and being in a good mood, and she always gets on my case in problematic ways if she notices I'm in a genuine good mood)
So I try asking the Witch if she can, like, hide herself or something before these people get here. Miss Witch clearly does not understand the question, I don't need to translate her hastily-scribbled one-word response to know that. So probably not. And there's no way I can hide this giant-ass Opera House. Fuck, fine, I'll bail-
-the muppet never taught me how to get out of a Labyrinth. Fuck.
Can I get out? Aside the Witch being beaten up, which worked last time? Holy shit the rat sucks, it really shoulda either told me how to get out or told me it doesn't know a way, whichever!
So I try asking the Witch how I can leave her Labyrinth and- uh oh. The hell? That is a weird melange of feelings, some weird mix of desperate craving like I've seen from addicts and some starving homeless, possessive lover shit, fear of abandonment, and defensive anger like I've seen when adults have tried to take a kid's favorite teddy bear or whatever. What the hell, we've known each other like five minutes and I've not been twisting you to like me way more than would naturally happen! But hey, whatever, I can just tamp down that-
okay it turns out i can't do that trivially and also the familiars are now focused on me
goddammit this was going so well
On the plus side, the clione is apparently still stuck on the stage, I wasn't standing too close to it when this shit started, and the clapping octopi just keep clapping without otherwise moving. Which, hey, creepy! But convenient! On the minus side my powers are still not adequately helping here, and Freestyle Actor Troupe Except Not is... a ways away, maybe a kilometer? Ugh, these Labyrinths mess with my power way too much, I can't trust my gut.
I try one last bit of talking at the Witch, but while the clione nods or shakes its head at me in a reasonably coherent way, the cacophony of feelings it's putting out makes me think it's just trying to stall me, not really listening to me. The impatience, for one. The fact that some of the familiars are putting out that five-year-old 'ha ha I'm so sneaky' dumbassery while drifting our way, for another. (How do they talk, there's clearly some communication going on there but I haven't seen any evidence of what the system is)
Okay so now I have to defend myself with my Magical Girl Powers!
...
What the fuck can I even do? Goes through my head as I eye my stupid criminal-catching stick. I can jump, possibly heal fast, detect Labyrinths with my soul marble, and... uh... holy crap the muppet really did fail to prepare me for this. Do I even have magical fighty powers? The muppet said something about my wish deciding my abilities or something, but that doesn't narrow it down at all. Uuuurgh, okay, uh, let's... finagle one of the familiars my way and... bop it with my stick? Surely this outfit came with the stick for a reason, right?
While I'm wandering to the turtle's edge, wondering how this works and fantasizing about dropkicking the rat, the Witch is getting desperate and scared and darkly depressed. "God, so clingy," I mutter to myself, reminded of some early toys, from when I thought Daddy's style was a good fit to my pow- wait, what? I turn to look at the stage in confusion, baffled by the Witch's switch in its symphony of suffering. Shame, horror, and embarrassment bursting forth to start, followed closely by a hard core of guilt that a weak shell of righteous anger is desperately trying to bury while the shame whistles at the edges, feeding both feelings. The hell? I've heard almost exactly this when someone heard a criticism for the millionth time that they agreed was true and hated about themselves. But... how?... do Witches bitchily gossip at each other? Are Earth Witches just a bunch of outcast refugees whose society exiled them?? What is this?
Fuckit, forget escape, back to talking!
I stalk back to the audience and point accusingly at the clione. "Hey, hey!" No reaction, annoying me- oh right, need to use French. So then I do my best to grab their attention, demand an explanation for why being called clingy bothers them, and do my best to shove away their confusion and otherwise push them to answer the damn question instead of questioning how I noticed their mood. Then adjust my target a bit because their confusion ramping down correlates really damn close to all the musical sealife around us being distressingly interested in me, and lo, letting them have their confusion gets the fishies backing off. (Why???) So that's useful, if confusing. Anyway, after a bit of fiddling, we manage to yes/no our way to the Witch communicating that she does in fact feel called out... but she can't tell me by who. She's very vehement on it NOT being fellow Witches, and in fact it finally occurs to me to ask her if she's ever met a fellow Witch, which gives me a... confused answer. She nods yes, but also no, and when I press she basically gives me a helpless metaphorical shrug. And her 'scape confirms that both answers feel true AND wrong to her. What the hell?
Unfortunately, before I can get any of the answers I most want, the cheery troupe gets in range. Above and beyond my power tracking them at all times, I know they're about to arrive because the Witch starts spiking a tired old feeling of betrayal -an 'oh, I should've known it was a trick, it always is' sort of feeling- and stops cooperating with talking to me, while the sealife stops dithering and starts swirling toward me and/or the troupe. The other other reason I know they're here is one of them squealing, "We're here to rescue you, new girl!" from above and behind me, far enough away it's not earsplitting but still close enough I'd be unhappy to hear it even if they weren't interrupting my study session. Jerks.
I sigh to myself and loudly inform the Witch in my best approximation of a formal apology in French (I know roughly how it goes off the top of my head, Pauline loves formal language and Daddy demands apologies from her a lot) that I have no ties to these jerks and please don't lump me in with them plz and thx. That gets a huffy sort of disbelief and still has shades of the bitter, tired betrayal thing in the background, so I'm pretty sure the Witch is thinking... well, something along the lines of 'I don't see how it can be a trick, but it has to be a trick even though I don't see how that would work'. Annoyingly, at least one of the troupe is apparently close enough to hear me, and probably understand me, because they spike confusion laced with suspicion and sundry other 'maybe this is a bad idea' types of feelings. So probably at minimum they can tell I'm talking to the Witch, and I guess other magical girls don't fucking try talking to the clearly intelligent beings the fucking puppet points them at? God, do other people actually fall for that stupid elemental evil spiel? I feel abruptly exhausted just imagining interacting with the troupe.
That's about when I notice the muppet sitting eerily still in the shadow of The Opera House Witch, red eyes glowing enough it honestly just looks like the eyes are floating alone if I don't squint a little to see the outline of its body. How the hell does its white fur manage to blend into the darkness so well?? Whatever, it's staring at me, back again, and I consider zapping it with -yeah, let's hit it with a big ol' dose of shame! This causes its tail to tick-tock, but it doesn't overtly freak out or leave or anything. Hmmm. No idea what to make of that. But whatever, the puppet can wait!
I (grudgingly) turn around to look at the troupe, sigh to myself as I get eyes on what my power was already broadly telling me about them murdering their way through familiars in acrobatic fashion, and scrutinize them a bit more closely.
Apparent Leader is a short girl in a pretty muted ensemble. Like, I'm put in mind of a man's tuxedo, only if I squint I can tell it's actually a very dark blue, the kind of blue that can look like black in the right lighting or alongside other colors, and there's a light dusting of purple glitter or something that's invisible except when the light catches it just right. There's like absolutely nothing visible of her body below the neck, too, her hands covered by intensely white gloves, the pants meeting directly with leather-looking flats that are a boring brown, and the tuxedo is done up properly instead of showing a little cleavage or anything. She's even wearing a fucking tie!... though the tie is a little out of place, as even from a distance I can see some kind of face drawn on it. I'm going to just call it a 'demonic' face until I can get a closer look; it doesn't look like it's meant to be friendly. Dark enough to blend in with the tuxedo if you're not scrutinizing it, though. Also out of place is the garotte she keeps using to choke the shit out of familiars. (I'm honestly confused as to how that works...)
Apparent Leader's 'scape is kind of interesting, in that she's a Nervous Nellie sort. I was pretty sure of this before I looked at her because there's a lot of ambient anxiety and blips of terror occur regularly in a way that makes me think she's perpetually haunted by thoughts like 'did I forget to turn off the oven?' only actually I mean probably more like 'is that one guy I run into a lot stalking me?' (Actual example btw, there's a dude she runs into a decent amount at random and gets really anxious around. Pretty sure he's not a stalker 'cause he doesn't seem to really notice how often they run into each other), but seeing her in person is pretty strong confirmation; anytime the garotte isn't being used for its proper purpose, she's perpetually wringing it in her hands as an obvious nervous gesture. Also constantly glancing at her fellow girls, making sure they're alright and swooping to the rescue if she thinks they're struggling a bit. She's like a really nervous babysitter, except all these girls look up to her instead of resenting her for taking away the freedom promised by not having parents watching over them. If I'd realized the group wasn't just rando freestyle entertainment artists I would've people-watched this batch just to see this dynamic in action, honestly. (It helps that she's got a cute face; the pageboy cut usually looks bad to me on anyone, but the way it frames her face works well) I'd honestly been previously interpreting her as the oldest person in this group, but she's so short it's making me doubt my long-range assessment, especially with the cute face; looking at her just feels like I've got to be looking at somebody who's not done with puberty.
Maybe Second In Command is much more along the lines of what's in my head when I hear 'magical girl'. Really cheerful (Maybe even annoyingly so), for starters, but also her outfit looks like it's riffing on the general range of a cheerleader outfit with the short skirt and tanktop plus shoes. (No pompoms, though) Mind, I don't believe for a second there's an actual school that approved this design, as the skirt is made of a writhing mess of red and white strips that manages to call to mind tentacled horrors of the deep yet also feel like she'd turn into a human buzzsaw if she pirouetted, the tanktop has no school name or icon or whatever and is just a boring red, she's wielding a couple of those cheer squad stick things (Keeps smashing familiars with them, actually), and why the fuck are the shoes heels? Are those six-inchers? Holy shit, are you trying to break your neck? Cheer squads don't do heels for a reason! But still. Teen girl but cooler, basically, including the blonde ponytail cheerleader thing. I've got a back-of-my-head profile of Maybe-SIC here, but it's mostly just that she's cheerful and helpful and sometimes struggles with depression but never for long and -y'know, I thought she was staving it off by throwing herself into her troupe's routine, but now I know what she actually does I'm a bit confused by it? Does she like battles to the death against unimaginable horrors?... or does she think of this whole thing from some kind of right angle I'll never guess without talking to her? Missing something here...
Third Place is a toy who I have previously played with, who thankfully doesn't seem to recognize me when I'm not crashing at her place and shutting her up with kisses. (I've run into her a few other times; she never recognized me before, either) A Kyushu refugee, she's always looked the part; a little too skinny, hair always looking a bit like dry straw (but black), clothes rarely fitting quite right, and perpetually a little too stressed for her exact situation. (tbh this was part of the appeal; if I could make her stop acting so damn haunted for five minutes, it made my problems feel a little less like they're unbearably heavy) Though right now she's looking pretty slick in a whatsit, that Japanese thingy that I was surprised to learn is actually a unisex outfit, anyway it completely obscures how thin she is, and her hair is pleated or something so well no errant hairs are undermining her look, and even though my power is still telling me that she's worrying she's even got a better poker face for some reason. No idea what the stick with paper bits trailing it is supposed to be about. It sets familiars on fire when she bops them with it, never mind we're underwater, but that doesn't explain how it meshes with the outfit. Eh, whatever, Ky... ana? Oko? Whatever, Ky-something here normally is pretty passive, easily lead around even without power assistance (Her mother isn't a cape, for one), so unless she recognizes me I'm not terribly concerned by her.
Miss The Fourth is dressed the part of a princess. And not like a halloween costume princess or whatever, but the whole shebang; lots of layers to the dress part, kept in that poofy shape by a metal cage (Probably, fuck, who knows with magical girl costumes, I didn't even pick mine it just appeared), ribcage being squeezed into the desired shape by that whatsit I don't remember the name of, sleeves way too long, and carrying a pair of those fancy fans a princess hides her face with. Though. Those don't normally have razor edges, or turn into spinning discs of death when thrown, and certainly don't boomerang back into a princess' hands. Because I'm seeing her from below for the moment, I can also see that she seems to have Cinderella-style glass slippers, and also that the poofy dress thing is more or less completely filled out inside; that looks like it has to be a pain to walk in. It's all intensely purple outside the sleeves and inside the skirt being a clean white, which I have no idea if that actually means anything given the outfit weirdness, but it's certainly a memorable look. This girl I've also got a back-of-my-head profile for, she's going to college, probably got a part-time job outside the troupe (Which, hey, Witch-fighting presumably doesn't pay bills given all the secrecy), she's a broadly sociable sort but in a take-it-or-leave-it sort of way where she's happy to hang with friends but is also perfectly comfortable reading a book/watching a movie/playing a video game/whatever it is she does to entertain herself alone. I've never closely scrutinized her before, though, so I'm probably missing important nuance. I like the dreads. Not sure I've seen Princess Dreads as a look before. Feels like a crown or tiara or something would complete the look, but still pretty cool.
Fifthsies is the girl I was most interested in having some fun with if I found the time, because she's spent over a year perpetually seeming resigned but... rarely depressed. Usually that kind of chronic resignation goes hand-in-hand with depression -I'm actually not sure of the cause/effect relationship there, it's so rare to hear exceptions lasting longer than a couple weeks. I've been really curious if it was just a personality thing, or a really weird situation, or a deliberate effort thing, or a power thing (I was mostly sure she wasn't a cape, but only mostly), or something completely outside my experience! Knowing she's part of this whole shebang makes me even more curious -and also makes it really frustrating I don't know what the fuck decides our costumes. Hers is a goddamn animal mascot thing that means nothing to me (Some kind of crab or lobster or something??), but which is WAY more cheerfully-designed than I'd have expected if she made it herself, with the idiot grin and enormous 'innocent' eyeballs and pale pink base color interrupted by little rainbows and hearts and smiling suns and moons and aaaaaa it looks like something Dar' would hug while sleeping!! And I have no idea how this connects to her psych stuff because seriously how the fuck do costumes work?? (Also, being an animal mascot means I can't see HER at all...)
Sixthers looks like she's A Mom in her late twenties or early thirties, which catches me so off guard everything else about her takes a bit to register. (Pretty sure she does have kids, too... I'd been guessing she was an older sibling, previously, but being a mom fits way too well with what I've overheard) Every other magical girl I've met has been in the teen-to-maybe-twenty range that was so typical of that genre before Kyushu killed it, I'd just sort of accepted it as a thing that probably is about the muppet being a creep, but this raises questions! Gaaaah! But here and now, she's in an intensely yellow sundress patterned with sunflower imagery, including a hat that really just looks like she ripped a sunflower's head off and plopped it atop her own head. It's kind of wigging me out, partly because I've always internally called her 'the wilting sunflower' because she's struck me as a broadly upbeat person who folds too readily -I thought she was an older sibling instead of a mom in part because I got the vibe she tends to be talked into doing things by the brats she's riding herd on, which I've overheard plenty from older siblings either being threatened with the specter of parental authority by younger siblings or by the older sibling being unreasonably fond of the younger, but I don't think I've otherwise heard a parent so readily, consistently fold in the face of social pressure from their own kids.
Though the other reason it's wigging me out is that she's hacking her way through the fish and whatnot with a combination of what looks like bloodstained pliers made of bone and some kind of bloodstained cleaver-y thing? Also made of bone? At least, that sure looks like a spinal column for the handle and some probably-not-human skull capping the end of the thing. What the fuck? Where's the blood coming from, the fishies aren't bleeding! Aaaah I wish I knew how to figure out what decides costumes and shit because what the fuuuuuck!!!
The above all being less a direct representation of the words flashing through my skull and more an extended summary of the impressions flitting through my brain for the thirty seconds or so of gaping at these people as they ripped their way through fish and whales and shit and finally landed in front of me.
(One of the main sentences that did actually go through my head was being surprised they didn't share a coherent visual theme or anything; a lady-butler, a cheerleader, a Japanese whatsit, a princess of blades, a crustacean animal mascot, and Gone With The Wind Meets Axe Murderer? What is this shit?)
Ky-whatever is the first to speak up as the troupe lands, loudly announcing, "Don't worry, new girl, we know what we're doing," with a pretty good backing of bravado-y false confidence. Like, if I didn't have my power I might think it's actually genuine. Huh. Would not have pegged her as being able to manage that.
Butler lady the probable leader tacks on, "You're standing dangerously close to the Witch, miss! Please hurry over here!" Wow she really is a mother hen, she's genuinely all worried for me, a complete stranger she didn't know existed until... actually, all of them seemed unsurprised to see me. I'd been thinking they just stumbled into this place through what I'm gonna call 'chance', unfortunate timing for me but just a Shit Happens moment, but this all reads more like they came here to rescue me. Like when the Havergals came along. And blamed it on the rat.
...
Goddammit, muppet.
"I'm fucking fine," I bite out in frustration before remembering that I really ought to be finagling things with my power and natural charm. Like yeah sure it's moderately satisfying to see the troupe clearly balking at this unexpected response, but it's still stupid.
Affirming this is that the cheerleader rallies and declares, "You're a newbie-" Yeah that all but confirms the muppet talked them into coming. "-so it's understandable to be high on your new power-" There's some background embarrassment that strongly suggests she overestimated herself in her early days, and is assuming it of me just off that and not from any experience with other girls replicating it. "-but Witches should never be underestimated! So please step aside while we handle this!" I hate that she's striking poses the whole while.
Siiiigh. Okay, um, I really ought to think of an angle, but honestly I'm still a bit overwhelmed by all this crap? And am really hazy on what other magical girls do and do not know and what they expect others to know? So... truth-y things to lead with and decide maybe-lying or bending the truth as I go it is. So I wave a hand at the clione and very reasonably point out, "You might have noticed she hasn't attacked me, like, the entire time you guys have been doing your thing." Which gets an interesting reaction from the Witch, a mix of pleased surprise (Particularly centered on me saying she, for some reason) and a bit of sit-up-straighter pride plus some covetousness I consider tamping down but I'm not sure what she's specifically coveting so I leave it alone for the moment.
Less interesting (Because it's completely unsurprising) is that the troupe are all pretty taken aback by this response, where it's pretty obvious this is outside the range of possible responses they imagined. Ky-something rallies first, literally turning her nose up, and declaring, "Witches have been known to lull girls into a sense of false security before springing their trap," which hey, miss stage Witch finds that hurtful, big fucking shock!
And rrriiight now I'm more inclined to make nice with the pocket dimension monster I'm hanging out inside of and that was actually being pretty cooperative before these jerks showed up than with said jerks, so I cross my arms as best I can without dropping my stupid criminal-catcher-whatsit and point out, "She's right over there, she can hear you, this isn't even talking behind someone's back." Opera House Witch has a splash of gratitude, while Team Magical Girls are responding with a mixture of 'this girl is crazy' and 'I don't even know how to respond to this strangeness'.
"There is ample evidence that Witches do not speak any human language," slithers into my brain and apparently the brains of the girls in front of me as the muppet steps a bit more into the open. I notice that Miss Mom is the only member of the troupe whose response to the puppet revealing itself is fully positive; way-too-short-leader-girl is wary and upset but doing a pretty good job keeping it off her face, and Peppy Preppy Cheerleader has some background uncertainty lurking behind her enthusiasm, while everyone else is in the vicinity of half-and-half on 'oh cool this person is here' and 'oh great I don't really want this unpleasant person here'. I also notice that the fucking rat didn't say anything about understanding human languages. People tend to think 'speak the language' and 'understand the language' are the same thing, but they're not, and it really stands out how this is like a response to what I said that implies my objection is irrelevant same as saying mean things about an owl right in front of it isn't going to offend it. It's a really artfully-crafted technically-not-a-lie. Sure, muppet, your species doesn't do the lying thing. Riiiight.
I briefly consider pointing this out, but the tones I'm getting from these girls make me doubt they'll buy a logical argument unless I put a serious emotional whammo on them, which is always tricky to juggle with more than about three people and also it occurs to me that magical girls are rocks piloting meatsuits so I'm not sure I want to commit to a plan that relies on my power working exactly as expected. (Like yeah, Courtney was easy to perk up with my power, but I didn't really mess around and do thorough tests of this topic) So instead I gesture at the Witch and ask her in my rusty French to wave hi to the girls. The clione obligingly does so, which Ky-something doesn't seem to notice but the rest of them just stop and do an exaggerated blink one time, weirdly synchronized. So then I turn back to the rat and its patsies and say, "So are you going to do that stupid thing of trying to argue it must've been a coincidence because anything that doesn't look like a human is ~obviously~ too dumb to make sense of words while that fucking muppet is talking to us-" The heat in my voice kind of pisses off princess girl, but the rest of them are getting personal mixes of shame/guilt/ohshitIfeelstupid type stuff, so I'm thinking this is more or less getting through to most of them? "-or are you going to let me go back to speaking rusty French at her and figure out her deal and all?" Miss Witch seems flattered? I have no idea what to make of that, given her English is apparently existent but not terribly good.
Preppie peppy cheerleader surprises me a bit by saying, "Witches kill people," in a really intense way where she clearly has no intention of listening to counterarguments. Though the rising cloud of bitter self-hatred and regrets and so on paints a pretty vivid picture to me -I'm guessing she tried making nice with a Witch and then it ate a friend or relative or whatever and now she refuses to Ever Make That Mistake Again.
I shrug, though. "And humans kill humans, but Canada hasn't had a state execution of a non-parahuman for like thirty years, not even for actual factual serial killers. And the PRT is pretty negative on vigilantes murdering people who don't have a Kill Order on them." When Lifter did his stupid Youtube announcement of his intention to kill Tube Lord, the video got a very public takedown and like a month later he was in one of those mid-tier jails for parahumans who can't be held by a regular jail. This isn't exactly a secret.
Animal mascot girl and preppy pep cheerleader aren't terribly happy to hear what I'm saying but I'm getting the vibe they kind of resigned themselves to 'being bad people' a while ago and adding more guilt is just going to result in longer angsty diary entries later or something rather than a change in their behavior. Butler Leader, Miss Mom, and Princess Dreads are clearly having more of a 'I hadn't thought of it that way' sort of response, like they're not sure I'm right but they're a bit less certain of their own rightness than they were before I spoke. Kiyone -right! That's her name!- is clamping down on some kind of anger? She's the one that speaks up, though, and I actually can't hear the anger in her voice at all, so that's a bit impressive. "Witches can't be dealt with by regular people and are monsters that feed-"
"-On human suffering because they're evil horrible fairy-tale monsters, I'm assuming the rat told you just like it told me?" I interrupt with because oh god I don't want to listen to this idiocy be regurgitated again. Interestingly, only Miss Mom doesn't take a step back at that. And not just like metaphorically; the other five all flinched, took a step back like I'd slapped them, and except maybe animal mascot girl I saw their eyes dart to the puppet. (Stupid full-body costume)
"I do not lie," lies the puppet again. The voice is flat and all, but the fact that it inserted itself into the conversation to object to that piece... interesting. I think being called a liar really bothers it.
Miss Mom very clearly has not noticed her fellow troupe members reacting to what I said, just looking at me and very earnestly saying, "Please, miss, this is already hard, just... step aside and let us work and we'll mentor you afterward. It'll be fun!" The exact lilt she puts on that last bit makes me think she's spent a little too much time recently with itty-bitty kids, like she's gotten too used to convincing brats to go along with something by framing it as a game they'll enjoy. I could be reading too much into it, though.
I waggle a finger at her like I'm an adult telling a kid they're being naughty and they need to stop, doing my best to replicate the expression Toy #3 would put on when she was trying to mom at her kids in the most condescending way possible. (She was fun. An awful, awful mother to her kids, but fun to watch and mess with) "Nah. You fight Miss Opera Witch here-" holy shit that is a big swoop upward in happiness from Miss Witch. Does she like that name? "-you fight me, too, and I'll be honest, you don't want to fight me."
There's a long pause while the six magical girls take in the newbie magical girl the muppet apparently asked them to please rescue, stare at how I'm leaning on my criminal-catcher thing rather than having it at the ready, and mostly they pretty obviously are in disbelief at both the fact that I'm insisting on this and that I think I have a chance in a 6v1. And then Princess Dreads, to my surprise, apparently makes the correct intuitive leap. "She's a parahuman," she says while backing up a considerable distance and bringing her razor fans up in what looks like some martial arts-y ready pose.
Interestingly, they all tense up and back away, even Miss Mom, who mournfully asks the muppet, "Why didn't you tell us, Kyubey?"
"You didn't ask." Wow this is funny to watch happen to others instead of having it done to me! I almost kind of like the puppet for 0.5 seconds! (Though it'd be funnier if Miss Mom wasn't the only one who seems genuinely surprised and hurt -the others were clearly half-expecting this response or something very close to it)
Aaaand then the six girls back even further away and start whispering to each other so I can't hear them, and I'm getting the vibe they're seriously prepping to make that attack instead of leaving and the whispering is so I can't hear their planning. "Hey!" I call out to them. "If you keep that shit up even 5 seconds longer, I'm assuming you're attacking us and I will self-defense the fuck out of you first!"
There's a second where they're all quiet and tense, another couple of seconds where they keep whispering until Kiyone notices me quietly counting down with the fingers of my left hand, and then right as I'm about to bring down my pointer finger and start the whammies they all jump away to the nearest chain and keep on fleeing.
"Huh," I say aloud because why not. "I didn't really expect that to work." And then my cell phone rings. "Oh for-" I sigh, unthinkingly pull out the cell phone before remembering it's in my purse, my purse doesn't exist, and also I'm underfuckingwater, but then it turns out the phone is magically in my hand and keeps on working, so... whatever. I take a steadying breath, paste on my best for-Daddy smile, and then answer the call. "Yes, Daddy?"
"Are you at that college again?" Daddy asks in that ominous way that means 'you better hope the answer isn't yes'. Fuck. What the hell?
"Of course not, Daddy, can't you tell?" I cheerily lie as the first response that comes to mind. I'm underwater in a magic music place with hellfire burning down below, it can't possibly sound like a college. Aaaand then I remember non-magical girls can't sense a lot of this shit and hold my breath, having no fucking clue what Daddy is hearing.
"... thought you hated movie theaters." He thinks I'm at a movie? Oh thank fuck! He thinks I'm at a movie!
Quick quick cover story um um shit oh I know! "I was scoping out a potential, y'know-" An aunt. One of Daddy's girls. But he hates us talking about this stuff in public, and he thinks I'm in public, so circumspection. "-she was really set on watching this movie and I figured it's been a while maybe it's easier?" Daddy is broadly aware I don't do well with TV and shit since I triggered. I don't think he has any idea why and suspect his assumptions have nothing to do with my power making it miserable, but he doesn't care and I'm not interested in cluing him if I don't have to.
There's a pause before Daddy asks, "Is it?" in his 'I don't really give a shit personally but I feel the need to probe your story in case it's a lie' voice, which already tells me he's 98% of the way to letting this go and never asking ever again.
I don't have to act at all when I heave an exhausted, twisted-up sigh and say, "Not even slightly." Because god. This has been a sucky experience.
My power makes it clear the following pause is him waffling whether to press harder or not, but thankfully he lets it drop. "Get home as soon as you can, don't go anywhere near the college, don't draw attention to yourself, there's a PRT investigation happening there."
What the fuck? Okay um- holy shit that is a lot of signatures in the room the Labyrinth entrance is in. Yeah, PRT officers, a couple Protectorate Heroes, and the suicide cult has been shuffled off. The hell, when did this happen, how did this happen, have I really been in here that long? Trying to not sound too distracted, I say, "Got it, I'll be back as soon as I can."
Daddy gives an acknowledging grunt, there's a moment where he clearly considers saying something more, and then he unceremoniously hangs up.
At which point I collapse bonelessly to the ground, sweating. (Miss Opera Witch reacts with middling concern to that, but mostly seems pleased as punch that the other girls are gone and I stood up for her) Shit. How the hell do I get out of this without something happening that can point to me being here? My costume is invisible, but if I appear in the classroom I'll still be visible, and Daddy will get pissy and suspicious if I just wait for them to leave 'cause that'll probably take until nightfall and... fuck... I still don't know how to leave the Labyrinth. I bonelessly roll my head to look at where the muppet was last lurking, and to my surprise it's still there, tail tick-tocking and empty eyes focused on me. "Hey, muppet." I wait a second to see if it responds to that, but nah, not that I can tell. "How the hell do I get out of Labyrinths?"
There's a long enough wait before it responds that I think it's just ignoring me and am about to ask the Opera House Witch when its dead voice pops into my skull. "Labyrinths are entered and exited at their edges if one does not simply defeat the Witch to make the Labyrinth go away." I kind of want to rage at that non-answer, but before I can muster the energy the rat asks, "Why did you not fight the Witch? You need its Grief Seed to survive."
I wonder if it's really trying to ask 'why did you side with the Witch against your fellow magical girls' but for some reason doesn't want to ask it directly. Not sure why it wouldn't want to ask it directly, but I can't get a proper profile on it, and it's maybe an actual factual alien, so who knows, right? After a second, I leverage myself to more of a sitting position, admiring how the Labyrinth is actually very pretty when its inhabitants are largely ignoring me. Then I say, "You clearly either have giant holes in your knowledge of how this shit all works or are actively lying about how it works. Just because you say the Witch eats people to survive and I have to eat Witches to survive-"
"That is not what I've said," insists the muppet as I talk louder over it.
"-doesn't mean either of those are true, it just means you have some reason for wanting me to think it's true. Maybe Witches can, I dunno, eat deer or something like regular human beings." No idea what the alternatives might be for me, mind, but that's why you ask questions and test theories, goddammit.
"Witches require a minimum intensity of emotional suffering-" I sigh at this routine returning. "-to sustain themselves, of which it is primarily humans, particularly human females undergoing puberty, that experience enough suffering to sustain a Witch."
I blink a few times at that, because hold on. "Wait, you mean that literally? Witches eat emotions to feed themselves?" Holy shit have I been misunderstanding it this whole time? Holy shit! The positive response! The one where I shoved despair at her and she liked that! Holy fuck, that actually fits to what it's saying!
"That is what I have been saying, yes."
Then it occurs to me abruptly that the Witch and her Familiars have, like, completely ignored the muppet this whole time. And I think that was true with the last Witch too. And the muppet says it's an alien that doesn't do emotions and- well. I think it's lying, or wrong, but maybe less wrong than I've been figuring? Maybe it feels with less intensity than my fellow non-Pauline humans, and maybe Witches can tell this is so somehow? Fuckit. "Hey, Imma test something real quick kthx," and then I SLAM the muppet with as much despair as I can as fast as I can, to the point I start feeling a pinch in my forehead like a headache might seriously start up if I keep pushing this.
The muppet's ears and tail wilt a tiny bit, so small a difference I wouldn't notice if I wasn't looking for stuff like that, and in fact so small I'm not completely convinced I'm actually seeing it rather than expecting it really hard. The Witch perks up a tiny bit, with a collection of tunes that put me in mind of when I've seen a dog pick up a scent of something it likes but it can't figure out where the smell is coming from.
Huh.
Then I do the same thing at like a quarter the strength but aimed at Miss Opera House Witch, and the clione swoons and hugs itself tightly, looking like it's an effort to stay standing upright, and the entire Labyrinth once again gets sedate and relaxed.
Huh.
"Are you using your parahuman ability? I do not see a test," the muppet obliviously asks and honestly I'm inclined to believe it's not noticing the signs I'm hearing.
I don't bother to respond, instead looking at the clione and doing my best with my bad French to ask Miss Opera House Witch (Yeah, she likes that name) if she can like move her Labyrinth elsewhere (Nod from the clione) and let me get home before my Daddy has a fit. (A sudden surge of sympathy and an earnest desire to help. Okay, the muppet was maybe lying less than I thought, but the 'elemental evil' shit is still crap)
Huh.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Turns out the muppet meant basically I needed to go back to around where I started and then keeping walking further away. Miss Opera House Witch is the 'center' of the Labyrinth, and the furthest bits start to fray at the edges, gaps appearing in the watery view that show glimpses of the regular ol' world I know. (Or, well, in this case, a view of an alleyway) Getting out is as simple as hopping through one of these tears in the Labyrinth's edges. It's both very weird and yet feels very human to me.
With Miss Opera House Witch being in such a good mood, the whole process is shockingly painless after I assure her I'll be by again as soon as I can, which yeah I will because this is fascinating and potentially very, very useful. Imagine conquering Canada with not only the Vasil parahuman clan but also a bunch of literally invisible secret police that can monitor the normies unseen! I suspect a lot of parahumans won't be able to cope with this shit. And conveniently, Daddy and I have the best powers for keeping Witches happy at no real cost! Great synergy, and I'll be assured to be Daddy's indispensable second in command since I can track these things and all. Fuck yeah!
Anyway, the only real hurdle is that for some fucking reason the water is sufficiently water-like that once I'm out of the Labyrinth all of a sudden my hairstyle is ruined, the hair sticking everywhere to my back and shoulders, my makeup is running horribly, and my clothes are a mess. Like, my real non-costume clothes are somehow soaked. Somehow my purse's contents are fine, including the phone, somehow. Fine, whatever, figure it out later. In the here and now it means I need to come up with a good story for why I went to a movie and came back looking like I threw myself in a lake and then walked home.
(Also it means I'm freezing, but only for three minutes before I use my power to convince someone to give me their fur coat without them properly thinking through anything about this situation)
Amazingly, circumstances contrive so Daddy isn't home when I get back. He's off with Jean-Paul doing... not sure... whatever, point is I get back, have Pauline greet me at the door, take in that I'm still dripping water, and nod to herself and remark to nobody in particular that it's good I made it back more than 15 minutes before the point where Daddy told her to punish me for being late. One of the few good things about Pauline: she doesn't notice (Or maybe doesn't care, can't tell) the really obvious weird shit that if Daddy were present to notice would result in him grilling me and possibly figuring out I did in fact lie to his face. I didn't violate an explicit rule or order, so it's all good as far as she's concerned. So I get to shower, reapply the most prominent bits of my makeup, hide the purse and clothes where Daddy won't notice until they've dried enough to not be suspicious, practice my story about this girl Daddy will definitely not actually be interested in (Sorry, Daddy, she's hot and all, but she's enmeshed in a bunch of crap that'll make her hard to pull out and also she has Opinions about movies, including some movies you like, so...), and psych myself up for when he gets home.
Even more amazingly, that all goes perfectly smoothly. There's blips that make it clear Daddy is still wondering if I'm lying about something, but I'm mostly-sure he actually believes I didn't go to the campus and will drop that topic forever if nobody else reminds him.
So when I lie down in bed, it's with an uncharacteristic smile on my face.
(Carefully hidden from Pauline, because she's weirdly good at picking up on the difference between me faking a good mood and being in a good mood, and she always gets on my case in problematic ways if she notices I'm in a genuine good mood)
Still gonna link to my Ko-Fi page. And hey, I updated within a month! Amazing!
It's even more amazing when you consider the latter 2/3rds of this were not at all what I was thinking they'd be when I was plotting out notes. Cherie continues to be the character I write most prone to going off my rails at unexpected points for non-obvious reasons. I'd complain, but I generally find myself realizing I actually dislike several aspects of my original plans and am in fact happier with where Cherie dragged me, including in this case.
It's even more amazing when you consider the latter 2/3rds of this were not at all what I was thinking they'd be when I was plotting out notes. Cherie continues to be the character I write most prone to going off my rails at unexpected points for non-obvious reasons. I'd complain, but I generally find myself realizing I actually dislike several aspects of my original plans and am in fact happier with where Cherie dragged me, including in this case.
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Mizu
Software Developer
- Location
- Victoria, Australia
I'm not fully expecting the Opera Witch to remain alive by the time Cherie returns, but she's definitely getting hints of how stuff actually works with Madoka setting elements right quick.
Admittedly adult magical girls came as a surprise to me too. That taken from the mobile game? I know some characters from it are late teens, and def older than the 13-15 of the original anime cast.
Admittedly adult magical girls came as a surprise to me too. That taken from the mobile game? I know some characters from it are late teens, and def older than the 13-15 of the original anime cast.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
It's implied from the original setting. (I've never tried the mobile game but have heard anecdotally from I forget where there's some decades old veteran MG type character or characters in it.)
Interesting threadmark title you got there
- Location
- Wherever
I'm not familiar with the mobile game. (Beyond 'it exists' and the general concept of Doppels)
The status of adult magical girls is not obviously addressed by the original anime, but the picture painted functionally implies they must exist, albeit are probably uncommon, and notably the original anime tells us Joan of Arc was a magical girl -when she was roughly 17 when she met the Dauphin. In conjunction with seeing that eg Mami and Kyoko lasting for months or years as magical girls is not presented as an incredible feat, realistically there have to be magical girls who Contracted in their late teens (Like Joan), and then managed to survive into at least young adulthood. (Like Joan, who was 20-21 years old when she died)
Now there are fanfics that instead take a creepy Eternal Child Immortality approach to the topic (Where a girl Contracts at 16, and then never ages a day after that), and I don't consider that completely irreconcilable with canon and can totally understand making use of it, but by default I think canon functions better as a coherent setting if you assume magical girls age normally, which leads directly to the above 'there almost certainly are some actual adult magical girls'.
sigh
Corrected, thank you.
- Location
- The Great Beyond
- Pronouns
- He/She/They
if I recall right canon (that is to say the original anime) also indicates Cleopatra was a magical girl, and more broadly directly suggests all famous women were magical girls without actually like, digging into How That Looks in any detail.
DeclanDSI
Touhou 「 」 Youkai of 「Akasha」
- Location
- the Boundaries betwixt Fact and Fiction
- Pronouns
- ???
Would you consider it canon for your story if magical girls are able to learn how to consciously control their age like in the To the Stars fanfic? I mean, it seems plausible enough since the knowledge of any mechanics of being able to heal as a magical girl is seemingly not required by magic, so it's not unreasonable that knowledge of the mechanics of being able to "heal" your age either forwards or backwards is also not needed by magic.
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- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
I assume you meant to use either "doing" or "replicating" but not both?Ghoul King said:
"but the tones I'm getting from these girls make me doubt"?Ghoul King said:
"when I lie down in bed"?Ghoul King said:
Thanks for writing!
I want Cherie to discover what Witches are by blasting a Magical Girl with Despair.
Also IIRC Magical Girls at high Despair are usually very unreasonable, slow acting and glassy eyed. They would probably respond to this emotion much more strongly than normal people and be very easily frozen unmoving. Which would encourage Cherie to using this emotion until they crack, when she realizes how effective it is.
Like imagine. Because of constant feeding of a Witch with Despair, she would try it on one of Magical Girls. Then she is surprised how "out of it" magical girls become under despair blasting. Which makes Cherie to start using Despair as her main anti Magical Girl weapon. But then surprise! One cracks. And Cherie finally figures out what the Witches are.
Also IIRC Magical Girls at high Despair are usually very unreasonable, slow acting and glassy eyed. They would probably respond to this emotion much more strongly than normal people and be very easily frozen unmoving. Which would encourage Cherie to using this emotion until they crack, when she realizes how effective it is.
Like imagine. Because of constant feeding of a Witch with Despair, she would try it on one of Magical Girls. Then she is surprised how "out of it" magical girls become under despair blasting. Which makes Cherie to start using Despair as her main anti Magical Girl weapon. But then surprise! One cracks. And Cherie finally figures out what the Witches are.
- Location
- Wherever
Not this one, no. For inscrutable author reasons I might explain if reminded much later, but not now.
Gah, I made a pass just last night and thought I got everything!
Corrected, thank you.
As far as the original anime depicts things (Which is, in most respects, all I'm really paying attention to when it gets down to it), magical girl Despair is really basically just regular real life depression, only instead of considering slitting your wrists when it's bad you spontaneously explode into a Witch. (And also performing magic can push one toward it, in the same way that eg eating certain foods can push a person to a more depressive mood)
Which is to say that in the context of this 'fic the primary mechanical difference from Cherie's perspective is that making a magical girl depressed would 'stick' even once she stopped using her power to push it (Because the mood is enforced by the Soul Gem clouding, which seems only possible to undo by getting Grief siphoned elsewhere), and also that yeah they'd unexpectedly Witch out if she pushed it far enough. Otherwise the behavioral effects would be exactly as per a regular depressed person.
- Pronouns
- They/Them/She/Her
- Location
- United States
I'm assuming it probably isn't going to happen (unless you want to take on the challenge of writing from a Witch's perspective), but Cherie is going to need to be really wary of her father's punishments if he goes for Despair rather than the standard Fear. At least after she learns about it. He doesn't seem to go for half measures. (Which admittedly is probably partially because he can't actually sense what he's doing like Cherie can.)
I am interested in where Cherie's soul gem stands right now too though-- unless that Witch was siphoning off Grief just by being near or interacting with Cherie, she could be in a precarious position already given how quickly her gem filled last time she was using her powers. Kyuubi wasn't wrong in that respect when it comes to Grief Seeds being necessary. She's going to need to figure something out for that if she doesn't want to murder witches.
I was also interested in how quickly the magical girls reacted to her being a parahuman-- that could be standard 'parahumans are dangerous, treat with care', but it felt more to me like 'parahumans are walking time bombs as magical girls because they're already so unstable'.
- Location
- Terra-Luna
This does seem like one possibility. Kyuubey seems like he may have just previously decided that Cherie needed eliminated—the whole team of magical girls coming in when and how they did does seem rather suspicious, and she has been messing with him directly, in addition to doing things that could possibly have been considered detrimental to priorities—but the encounter itself with the magical girls and all that transpired may well have given him data that might be promising.
The fact that she has her particular parahuman power has no small potential. It just gives a lot more options when it relates so closely with magical girl matters.
Perhaps more significantly, there's also just the matter of Cherie being, well, Cherie. A whole lot of Kyuubey's issues with all sorts of things just might get a proverbial monkey wrench hurtled into them by Cherie just getting fed up with his seemingly willfully self-deluded sophistry and general idiocy by just snapping and losing her patience, and griping at him that it's more efficient, you nitwit! For all that Kyuubey seems to indeed actually be more emotional than he pretends—even to himself, really—actual logical arguments could go a long way towards convincing him, and a previous comment about the Incubators coming across as incredibly stagnant and just continuing with their entropy solution the exact same way once they found something that worked seems all too accurate, the Incubators ironically seeming about as uninnovative as the other alien handing out powers.
Cherie isn't stupid, possessed of little actual schooling and less care, yes, but she is shown to be rather smart when she has the inclination to set her mind to task... and having to deal with Kyuubey's entirely unnecessary problems could certainly be the sort of thing to motivate her. If she points him towards a way to address priorities more effectively, maybe the little shit will stop being such an aggravating dumbass!
Amusingly enough, that sort of pragmatism also comes up with Cherie's apparent new career. Making people not be annoying or escaping/preventing trouble is enough to prompt Cherie to claim that she's a hero. And she actually has a pretty good point. One that she completely coincidentally lives up to very well. Cherish of the Heartbroken, Independent Hero (and Magical Girl)! Because people randomly committing suicide absolutely do need saving, arranging for people to be happy is personally satisfying and interesting, and sad people deserve to have someone help them through their problems. Plus it, y'know, cuts down on the "eek, run away, shoot her" bit and super awkward questions, which is totally the important part and the only reason why she's an amoral supervillain impatiently serving the chief sleazebag by day and a Champion of Love & Justice by night and whenever her family isn't looking and if she thinks she can get away with it even when they are. Honest!
Hm. This raises an intriguing consideration. Is Cherie at such risk now? Reasonably, her father could use his power on her, but that may not necessarily be the same thing as if he would when he actually tried to do so.
Cherie is now a rock.
Cherie can use her emotion manipulation on magical girls, but she also has the ability to sense emotions too. The power interaction could go whatever way, but when there is some degree of significance with Cherie interpretably not "really" being the meatbag, then if daddy dearest were to turn his power upon supposedly her, would he perhaps simply aim at the wrong target? Parahuman powers at least in the non-crossed canon don't deal in souls and manipulate the body and yet Cherie is herself indeed able to sense and manipulate emotions for magical girls, Witches, and familiars alike, but faulty aiming does seem as though it could be at least a possible factor.
Whether it's good or bad for Cherie might remain to be seen.
Cherie's relationship with the Opera House Witch and more broadly potential relationships with future Witches in general might offer her some unique and very convenient mutualist possibilities. Unturned Magical Girls need Grief Seeds to offload their Grief if they are to survive... but need it be a dormant Grief Seed? Active, hatched Grief Seeds that have had the Witch emerge can evidently take in at least the emotion grief, and both really like it and can be sated by it to become sedate and complacent. So, hypothetically, at least, as the other magical girls might well do something less than convenient, might Cherie... basically just be buddies with the Opera House Witch?
Labyrinths can be moved around, Witches can be conditionally negotiated, Witches can be rendered effectively dormant and unmotivated to bother anyone, Cherish can spam grief, and she has inclination to offload Grief that seems highly desirable to Witches. In that case, are just the right parahuman powers and really crappy French all a magical girl needs to effectively sidestep Grief Seed economy and be on her merry way?
This seems like Scion might be a factor.
When Kyuubey gives Cherie the magical girl pitch, Scion gets brought up as part of what seems a very standard speech with the great golden idiot presented as basically some great evil to be vanquished, and he's not shy about answering some quite unflattering questions about the other dumb power-granting alien. That suggests a fair possibility of a—possibly deliberately promoted—common perception within the magical girl community of parahumans being something akin to sort of their opposite number. Ironically enough, magical girls and parahumans are even nominally made for the same fundamental purpose in anti-entropy efforts, at that.
These other magical girls might see Cherie as part of a category that at best is like dangerous wildlife, not really necessarily an organised faction or aligned against them but simply something dangerous to all around as a neutral hazard, and in a worse direction, entirely possibly as agents of rival enemy force. When some of those parahumans can consist of the likes of the Faerie Queen, magical girls would even be quite right to think of some parahumans like that.
That could make magical girl parahumans quite the awkward subject.
On that note, then, for this crossover, now I'm quite, quite curious if Contessa became a magical girl too.
Movement 5: Dawn
- Location
- Wherever
"What do you mean you don't have a big plan?" I say to Daddy, everything feeling numb and more than a bit grey.
He doesn't even look up from the shitty breakfast Aunt Lucie prepped because he likes watching her cook for some fucking reason. I don't really hear his response. Something about living the good life, but it goes in one ear and never really makes it to my brain. Soul Gem. Me. I'm pretty sure I'm crying silently, I feel moisture on my face, but it's difficult to care. Aunt Lucie stops cooing at Daddy for a second, head lifting away from where she's had it propped up on her folded hands on the table, and looks at me in mild annoyance. She doesn't like the kids interrupting her 'alone time' with Daddy. Then her expression morphs into something distantly resembling concern, followed by alarm, eyes focusing somewhere on the back of my head. It takes me a long second to remember that's where the Soul Gem is sitting, tied up in my ponytail because I liked the look of it yesterday, and then it takes me still longer to feel vaguely confused at Aunt Lucie of all people being able to see this magical girl crap.
Then I decide I don't care about that and croak out, "You weren't growing an army?" What the fuck, I was sure... the Witches would've been perfect... it all made sense and would've made this all tolerable...
Daddy finally looks up at me, delivering his rare 'what kind of a moron are you' look, the one he only uses when he's so thrown by the stupidity of what he's hearing that he can't muster an immediate reaction beyond disbelief. I already have an idea what he's going to say before he actually collects himself enough to say it. "That's the kind of shit that gets the Protectorate to come down on you with Alexandria."
I sway on my feet for a moment, sick to my gut, unable to imagine why he won't let us leave if he's not making an army. What was the point of everything I went through, the burial, Pauline- why, if there's no real goal?... why was I even born, if not for this?
"I see," I absently respond with, too well-trained to just not respond to Daddy. "I-I-I have to go." Somewhere. Anywhere. Not here. "To." Has to be something he'll accept. "To..." What would he accept? What sounds plausible?
Then Aunt Lucie throws herself at Daddy screaming, "Get down!" while my world finishes unraveling entirely.
Status?
Location?
Status?
Status?
Locati-
Liba unfolded into existence, rifling through the remnants of this 'Cherie' person. Music leapt out at her, resonated, the symphony of being. Unbidden, her world filled with caricatures of this idea, musical notes bent into assemblages of personhood, humming or singing their truest feelings for anyone nearby to hear. Liba was briefly disturbed, but the familiarity washed over her, a nameless nostalgia for a time Liba consciously knew had never happened but which felt entirely too real, and she let it go, allowed these musical note creatures to flower in her garden.
(She realized moments later she wasn't sure how to make them stop in the first place, then decided it didn't really matter given it had worked out)
But what was music without context, place, purpose? A person's song was inextricably intertwined with everything around them -and scarcely had this dissatisfaction arisen in Liba when her world shifted again. The note-people found roles fitting to their existing symphony by logics that varied wildly but all felt right to Liba herself, and now their songs were concordant or discordant in a meaningful way, where Liba could imagine a conversation in how that one over there was blaring anger while the one nearest it hummed notes of anxiety and admiration. This enhanced the feeling of relaxing into familiarity, but something was missing -a symphony called for a conductor, she should be the conductor, this was right and true down to the bones she didn't have.
A piece of herself twisted itself into place, extruding from wherever Liba had been before to flower forth as a skin she felt comfortable wearing. A feminine body of transparent glass spun from thought, clad in clothes Liba told herself were a conductor's tuxedo though 'Cherie's' memories insisted it was more like a general's uniform, the head replaced whimsically with a sunflower's and bounded by headphones enveloping a simple military helmet, right arm gripping a baton that was also a rocket launcher, stars studding all the accoutrements. Liba stretched these new limbs, fitting herself into them, enjoying the soft notes her joints made as they slid against themselves, and then
she
conducted.
And oh, this, this was truth and life, the songs of being and tunes of acting. Guiding things to where they fit better, to where they sounded right, easing discord, shunting 'dangerous' music to the edges as best she could, pulling pleasing music closer to herself. A soft touch on a few note-people to change the symphony of many more in a ripple, making adjustments when the ripples didn't have quite the effect she wanted there, here, there again. Vim, vigor, flow, the breath of reality flowing out of her and into her world, filling it with all things correct.
In the background of her self, Liba digested the remnants of 'Cherie', came to understand her, and found herself looking upon a world beyond her own. A discordant parallel, so much alike in the ways that mattered, and yet so distant in so many ways. She was repulsed, yet intrigued. Songs that could not be touched directly, that could not be seen directly, a dreadful thought, yet some part of Liba looked upon this with excitement, an urge to tease out what the song was through cannier methods and use still cannier tools to finally make the song play the way she wanted it to play. A challenge.
But that would require stepping out from Liba's realm, a thought so unbearable as to be not quite unimaginable.
Or did it?
Many failed attempts at making beings she could not see or touch directly later, Liba grudgingly decided yes it did require it.
Which she hated.
Hated so much she put it off, ignored a gnawing something chewing at her heart pulsing away inside the hollow space of her glass chest, and focused anew on processing what remained of 'Cherie'.
She pulled out that Cherie hated and was suspicious of coincidences, a fact of little interest on its own, but it was bundled heavily with The Thing. The muppet. The rat. The incubator.
The thing Liba had paid no mind to as it stalked her realm's sun-bathed gardens, but she was suddenly scrutinizing very closely indeed. Should she call it father? According to 'Cherie's' memories, Liba was formed from The Thing and 'Cherie'. 'Cherie', Liba was bemused to realize, would've assumed Liba was 'Cherie', just in a different body, with a twisted perspective. Silly 'Cherie'. Of course Liba was another person entirely.
... Liba devoured more things and wondered if maybe this conviction was false. She didn't know why she thought it was so, why this belief was so sure. How could she test the roots of this belief if she knew not what they were? And, as she ate more of 'Cherie', she learned and wondered: if Liba is a 'Witch', and 'Witches' eat people... did Liba eat 'Cherie'? Was that why she had all these pieces of 'Cherie's' thoughts and memory lurking inside her, awaiting digestion?
Fortunately, Liba realized, this was an easy thought to test. There were plenty of 'humans' lurking just outside her doors. Somewhat fewer than had been when her own memories started, the 'Daddy' being having moved away swiftly with many others in tow for whatever alien reason these beings did their things, but still a dozen in easy reach. She didn't even need to move her concert. And, she found, she could discern the songs of these beings too, at least in part -sorrow, mostly, dirges of varying intensity, backed so distantly by other instrumentation Liba wasn't sure she wasn't simply imagining it. The most intense dirge -it was easy. It was natural. Liba reached out with a thought and brushed mental lips upon them, understanding all of a sudden the 'Witch's Kiss' term and finding it oddly endearing, and though she couldn't see the details of what ensued, in short order the dirge crescendoed and then wound down into peaceful silence. It was a very nice piece.
It also eased the gnawing on her heart, which Liba suspected now might've been thought of as her 'stomach' by 'Cherie'. She had indeed devoured this person.
Then Liba waited, one of her dozens of sunflower-seed-eyes on The Thing, another on the symphony of her world, and the rest closed in concentration. What life would unfold from this consumption? What knowledge would she glean?
A small eternity passed, time marked only by The Thing leaving and the gnawing on Liba's heart growing slowly again.
Liba didn't like to admit it, but maybe Cherie had been right. It had been forever and ever since she ate the dirge-person, and she hadn't digested a single piece of their experience. Pieces of Cherie's memories, thoughts, beliefs, perspective -those flowed into her still, and with these thoughts on her mind she found herself wondering about her realm -her Labyrinth- and how she had shaped it. The lurking shadowy figure, made of thorned vines studded by blue roses... was that the 'Daddy' figure, a representation of them, rooted in how omnipresently relevant this 'Daddy' had been to Cherie's life? Was her own view of this figure some variation on Cherie's perceptions? These figures she kept closest to herself -she could draw parallels in their songs to what Cherie had heard from her favorite 'toys', the ones she visited again and again to relieve her stress. #3, as she'd been thinking of it, was a cruel tune of smothering motherhood to 'children' who understood things were wrong but didn't think to blame the sMother, which sounded an awful lot like what Cherie had called 'Toy #3', as one example.
And the music. Liba really, really hated to admit this, but music had been such a part of Cherie. Her parahuman ability. One of her 'escape hatches' when she needed relief and couldn't leave the building, putting on headphones and blocking out everything except the music in people's minds. When Liba had remembered the Opera House Witch, she'd told herself the music was a Witch thing and Cherie was the weird exception of a human, but there'd been the masked mannequin Witch...
Liba grew weary of the gnawing at her heart and pressed her kiss on another. Cherie's memories told her this was murder, but it didn't really feel like it. Just a temporary end to the hunger. But then, Cherie's memories told Liba this was normal for humans. Not that they ate humans (Except when they did...), but that a chicken from the grocery store had been a living thing and now was just a way to sate hunger.
More importantly, Liba didn't extract anything from this new dirge-person. Or the old one. She was running out of Cherie to digest, the intrusive flashes of thoughts and memories alien to herself becoming ever more intermittent, her awareness of Cherie becoming a bassline throbbing at the foundations of herself. If she wasn't actively thinking about it like she was, it would probably have become like the refrigerator hum, a presence so continuous one simply forgets about it. If the digestion was linear, working through one person until they were largely gone, Liba should've already moved on to one of these dirge-persons.
And Liba had picked up so much about human psychology from Cherie's memories. Not just facts, but a visceral awareness, a constant tracking of human minds, seeing how experiences shaped people even when they insisted they hadn't changed at all, or how experiences not consciously remembered still changed a person. The malleability of a person's beliefs of their self, the potential contradiction in their thoughts of theirself vs their actual self.
So Liba's bone-deep conviction she wasn't Cherie, that her birth occurred alongside Cherie's death but they weren't related -no matter how firm the feeling was, Liba couldn't stop doubting it. And she'd found the cat's-eye gem that was her centermost self (Hidden away under her helmet, though she didn't remember putting it there), scrutinized it, compared it to Cherie's memories of her Soul Gem... they looked a lot alike. And Liba couldn't remember what had happened to Cherie's Soul Gem. Or where her Grief Seed had come from. And couldn't help but remember Cherie's conclusion that The Thing wasn't lying when it insisted she was now a marble piloting a body of flesh. What was more likely; that a marble piloting a body of flesh had simply switched to piloting a body of sugar, spice, and everything nice, or that the marble had been destroyed, another marble had formed out of nowhere, and the new marble had stolen all kinds of info from the first marble before it vanished?
The latter sounded, in Cherie's words, 'completely fucking stupid'.
The former was elegant.
Liba really hated how elegant it was. It made it so very hard to tell herself it was wrong and she wasn't Cherie.
She didn't want to call herself Cherie, though. It didn't sound right.
So she still called herself Liba, drew that line between the girl whose father had failed her so utterly she had died of heartbreak and the Witch who now lived on heartbreak. It felt artificial at this point, but she did it anyway. Maybe it would become natural someday. If Liba lived that long. Which she'd realized was actually a bit doubtful, given The Thing was so insistent on sending magical girls to defeat Witches, and then... ate their Grief Seeds, killing them? That part was hazy. And, Liba was vexed to realize, she was hampered by her new senses, where dirges were easy to find, track, listen to, give a kiss to, but everything that Cherie would've thought of as more 'real' and physical was a barely-there impression of space to hide Liba's Labyrinth entrance somewhere. Enough of an impression to not want to shove herself into the ground or try to anchor herself on thin air, both of which gut-level felt like bad ideas and with having thought about it seemed to in fact be bad ideas... but not much more than that.
Liba liked these senses, liked the world she took in with earphone-ears, but she couldn't help but think of a blind human's difficulties and worry about her ability to fend for herself against determined attackers.
So the next time The Thing came scouting into her realm, at a moment it was moving away from her body and so likely looking away, she reached down and pinched its head off, surprisingly red blood (Not green or blue, or something else alien?) making glass fingers slick.
This was briefly satisfying, but it occurred to Liba it wasn't a very good test. A magical girl would be expecting an attack, she remembered. The Thing probably hadn't because Witches ignored it normally -and, well. Liba could hear why, The Thing's end only briefly producing a barely-audible dirge, tinny and unsatisfying, empty of notes and actually a little annoying to listen to. If Liba had done it to ease the gnawing on her heart, she'd have been quite disappointed.
So, Liba realized, she should lure a magical girl to her Labyrinth and end their song. That would be a proper self-defense test. Could she identify a magical girl by their song? Liba wasn't sure. None of the songs she could hear sounded quite like Cherie's own memories. Even the Daddy figure... she'd known it was him, but his song had been incomplete, only a part of what Cherie remembered. Liba's favorite parts, admittedly, but still. A concern, and with Liba remembering the full richness of what Cherie heard, Liba felt wistful, wishing she...
... had...
... why did her heart pulse and beat with harsh discordance? Where was-
-atus?
Status?
Loc-
Sssssstat...us.
Confirmation. Location?
Loc.... ate. Locate. Error. Coordinates incoherent.
Confirmation. Secondary positional exchange protocol.
Pos- position, secondary protocol.
Confirmation. Position routable. Adjusting logics. Readiness?
Ready.
Confirmation. Connecting.
Liba did not sleep, yet somehow she awoke.
That was strange and set Liba on edge but-
but then
the symphony of the city made its fullness known to her
and it soothed
...
A timeless time later, the gnawing on Liba's heart grew enough she could no longer simply bask in the musical radiance of Toronto. She would need to kiss another -or would she? Liba remembered Cherie's doubts and The Thing's words and how they met. She remembered Cherie's distaste for murder, a distaste not born of morality but of the awareness that humans investigated deaths and it was tedious at best to avoid being found out. Liba had kissed two without consequence so far, but... Cherie's memories of moving when Pauline killed someone arose unbidden, of how unpleasant an experience it was, and Liba shied away from risking it. (And then wondered if investigation was already happening; there were dirge-people in what felt like the right area, with the right kinds of songs, to potentially be looking into the deaths. Liba couldn't be sure, though)
So... Liba's world slid and snuck its way through this outside realm, trusting Cherie's memories to plant herself nearby -or inside, it was difficult to tell- a specific 'old folks home'.
Liba was pretty pleased with this plan. Older dirge people, the memories from Cherie told her, were expected to die fairly abruptly at times. An error in her testing would be unlikely to be scrutinized. Also, she'd selected this particular old folks home because it was and had long been the least happy old folks home in the city; Cherie had never cared enough to look into why, but it had been stable on this point for over two years. Probably nobody involved would notice a cloud of misery rolling in to this particular place, as it already had its worse days quite regularly anyway. If Liba was lucky, she wouldn't even need to do anything.
...
Unfortunately, a day later (As determined by listening to the city's fall and rise, since Liba had neither clock nor outside sun to guide her), additional hurdles had revealed themselves. Simply lurking in the ambient angst was inadequate; Liba couldn't tell if nothing was making its way to whatever passed for her belly as a Witch or if it was merely too meager a flow, but whatever the case she couldn't simply squat near dirges and bask in the sound. At least. Not without a lot more dirges concentrated together.
But that was a thought to perhaps pursue later, when Liba might be able to actually arrange such a thing. In the here and now, Liba had to focus on solutions within metaphorical arm's reach. (Which, Liba was amused to realize, was a much smaller-feeling reach than her body's literal arm's reach) So she tried pressing a kiss to someone and then... reeling back? See if she could make it less intense, or make it so they didn't seek to kill themselves near her. Mark them and get the dirge to wash through her for as long as they lasted, or something like that.
This killed a dirge-person in the night, though thankfully it did not raise an alarm when the dirge-person was presumably found. (Liba couldn't sense them once their song ended, but she could remember, more or less, where they last were, and make inferences using Cherie's memories. When dirge-people approached the spot, became resignedly upset, but no more... she could fill in) The straightforward tentative ideas did not work; the kiss was not a dial Liba could turn to bring the intensity up and down like a CD player might have, but a toggle, something she could have completely on or not on at all. Nor, Liba was peeved to realize, were Cherie's assumptions of Witchly influence accurate; Liba could not affect the story the kissed told themselves, or if she could it was so completely invisible to her as to be effectively random, not something she could influence the way Cherie or her Daddy could if they wanted to.
The next night she tried applying the kiss, waiting an indeterminate time while the individual woke up and sought out whatever end they were trying to engineer, and removing it before their song could begin its conclusion. This was... a semi-successful experiment. It took a few attempts to figure out how to remove the kiss, with her initial attempts only not resulting in more deaths because she'd moved her Labyrinth away in worry that two deaths in a row would lead to investigation. This had led her to accidentally discovering the range limit Cherie had inferred, where the kiss went away if the kissed was too far from Liba's Labyrinth, and in turn that had led to her figuring out how to replicate the snapping feel as the connection broke, blindly grope with senses Liba couldn't quite quantify and sever such herself.
It felt strange and unpleasant, a bit like if Cherie were to eat half a steak and then spit the rest onto the grass; not harmful, but not something one would want to do.
But it did work to ease the gnawing at her heart.
By night three Liba was bored of trying these experiments, and also running out of ideas -and then the Opera House Witch reminded her of its presence by a growing feeling of having been betrayed and lied to. Liba grinned to herself with sunflowerseed-eyes, and slipped and slid toward the Opera House Witch, wondering why she hadn't thought before to simply ask if a fellow Witch knew. (And wondering if the feeling of betrayal was 'Cherie broke her promise and never came back', or something else entirely) She considered her angle, how kindly or pleading she should seem, as she approached, and was leaning toward-
bump
-???
Liba blinked with a hundred eyes, and tried once more to slide her Labyrinth closer to the Opera House Witch's, but sea met song and the two repulsed like magnets with a shared polarity. (Liba immediately decided this was a stupid metaphor she would never share having thought of with anybody) The Opera House Witch didn't even seem to notice, either, working herself into some frenzy of self-hate Liba... well, Cherie would've figured it was self-hate over having trusted that Cherie was being honest, but Liba was unsure whether to expect that to be accurate with a fellow Witch. Regardless, Liba pushed the edges of the Labyrinths against each other once, twice, thrice more, but it remained futile, not an iota closer to making contact than either of her first attempts.
Liba thoughtfully stroked some of the petals that sat where a chin would be on a more human body, and reminded of this piece of herself by the motion attempted to walk from the center of her Labyrinth to its edge. Surely she'd be able to walk into the other Labyrinth, yes?
... no.
No, she could not.
Wherever Liba's body walked, that was the center of her realm. She could walk to any part she liked, and spent a while doing so, but it never brought her closer to the edges of her realm, for her realm slid itself under her feet so she was always its center. The thorned mass of blue roses at one point disappeared as it slid what Liba arbitrarily declared to be 'north', moments later appearing in the 'south' without any change in its rhythm, apparently unaware; Liba's realm wrapped, like a globe but... not.
Liba was pretty sure this would've caused a headache in Cherie, but for Liba it honestly felt natural; of course she was literally the center of this realm she was metaphorically the center of.
Even so.
Here and now, it was inconvenient.
With the extremely stupid magnet metaphor lurking in the back of her flowery head, Liba walked her realm to other Witches, to other Labyrinths. Maybe it was something alike (Or unalike) about Liba and the Opera House Witch that made them incompatible. But no, with each Labyrinth it was the same; the edges refusing to quite touch. One Witch at least reacted as if she'd noticed, but she was also very much unhappy with it in a manner that Liba suspected would end in violence if at all possible, so Liba moved on from there quite swiftly.
As Liba wandered, she passed close to many of Cherie's toys, and casually paid a bit closer attention to them. 'Forever Alone' was difficult to read solely through his song, but Liba's intuition suggested he was freaking out, having looked back on his interactions with Cherie and realized something was wrong. He didn't seem to have gotten with anyone, more's the pity. 'Sporty' was a ball of anger with some betrayal-type tunes; she seemed to think Cherie had abandoned her, which struck Liba as very funny, and on a whim she briefly lit up the girl's day with songs of triumph and confidence-
-she what?
...
Liba made her way to another toy, a workaholic loner man Cherie had always called 'Too Sirius' (She couldn't remember his actual name), who had neither friends nor family to notice him going missing aside some semi-friends in online spaces who he still regularly went weeks without contacting. She poked, she prodded, she did not kiss, and it worked. It worked exactly as it had for Cherie ever since the day she'd been buried.
I guess I really am Cherie, thought Liba wryly. Why else would I have her power, if we're not simply one and the same?
This in turn led to a new test: she kissed Too Sirius, stayed atop him, and poked and prodded his song, this time with her parahuman -paraWitch?- power instead of what she now supposed were her natural (Magical) Witchly abilities. It required a lot of attention and felt slippery and difficult, harder to accurately adjust without being able to see his body language, his facial changes, hear him speak, and so on... but she marked him, fed on him, and he didn't reach a denouement. Her Labyrinth drifted away, and while he clearly recognized something odd had happened, as best as she could tell he blamed it on bad food or some similar thing -he didn't call the PRT office, at least.
Success.
Later that day (In the early afternoon? It seemed so, given the city's song...), as Liba was repeating the Too Sirius process here and there on isolated individuals, slowly wearing down the gnawing without being attention-grabbing, her sunflowerseed-eyes passed over The Thing in her Labyrinth. Not its corpse, which she'd forgotten about entirely actually, but The Thing itself walking about.
Liba didn't let herself visibly react, she was pretty sure, though her orchestra of note-people shifted their tunes so... she hadn't hid her response perfectly... but The Thing didn't seem to notice that. Liba watched, waited, drifted closer as best she could without looking like she was trying to approach, and eventually leaned down on past The Thing to (pretend to) closely scrutinize the blue-rose vine-being, as if she was wholly unaware of The Thing, even as she was actually scrutinizing it. Its surface looked the same to her, no evidence of different markings to its fur or a different shape; it wasn't fatter, thinner, taller, shorter. At least, not that she could tell. When it looked at her briefly, stopped in place for a moment as she loomed closer, its button eyes seemed the same as ever, its expression unaltered. When it then resumed its walk through her Labyrinth, ignoring her, it reminded her of Cherie's memories of it.
Was it the same individual, somehow? Liba had pinched off its head, hadn't she? Or was it a different individual, and Liba just couldn't tell the difference?
She leaned back, and thought, gloved glass hand sitting where she didn't actually have a chin. She didn't like The Thing, to be honest. Its song was the tiniest, tinniest, saddest attempt at real music she'd ever heard, and Cherie's memories were quite unhappy with it for a variety of reasons. Maybe she should pinch off its head again. Maybe it would eventually learn to leave her alone-
...
No, it wouldn't, would it? Cherie had become quite certain it was not only setting up magical girls against Witches in a general sense (Which, hold on, if Liba was Cherie, then... were all Witches once magical girls? This seemed exceedingly perverse to Liba, but it sounded too logical to dismiss entirely), but tipping off individual magical girls in the moment to go after specific Witches. While it was a weird little Thing and Liba was inclined to think it really was an alien like it said, she suspected it -or its fellow aliens- would not take kindly to head-pinching, and likely set magical girls upon her if she kept it up.
So no head-pinching, at least not to start.
Hmmm. Cherie had hated talking to The Thing, but Liba didn't find the thought too bothersome. And putting bits of memories together, she wondered: would The Thing be shocked if she did talk to it? This was an entertaining thought, so Liba indulged it immediately.
...
Tried. Tried to indulge it immediately.
Failed, because it turned out she was mute. She couldn't speak. She couldn't sing! Outrage! Loss, anger, fury at the injustice, that her voice had been taken from her. And- was this normal? The Opera House Witch and the mannequin hadn't spoken either, though the Opera House Witch had been eager to make friends with Cherie. Did Witches simply not have voices? Or was it just the forms they expressed themselves with? Would Liba have a voice if her body had lungs and a mouth, rather than hollow glass and a sunflower head? Or- her headphones! They made sound! Could she speak through those?
... no. They played the music she wanted, but no human voice would come from them, no matter how hard she tried to change their song. Trying to recall one of the few songs Cherie had liked where the singer's voice had complimented the tune... the headphones played the music, but not the voice.
Liba considered writing, but then remembered the oddity with the Opera House Witch: she'd understood French, seemed to try to write French, but out came that other... alphabet, or whatever it had been. So Liba fiddled with her realm, conjured a raven's quill and a music sheet from her thoughts over a few minutes, and tried to write -and out came musical notation. Which. Well, yes, that felt very right, Liba could read what she wrote just fine, it was a perfectly sensible system, but... she had doubts The Thing would understand it. It was also rather different from the Opera House Witch's attempt at writing, and Liba was unsure what to think of that. The Thing had emphasized that Witches all had very different realms, different Familiars. Maybe this was just one more example of that kind of variability. (Liba wondered, for the first time since Cherie's world had ended, what the rules on all this magical girl and Witch stuff was, especially now she had reason to suspect that Witches were all just magical girls shedding their squishy meat body for the sugar, spice, and everything nice a Witch was made of. Why was Liba's world one of song and sun, while the Opera House Witch had a world of song and sea sandwiched between a hellscape above and a hellscape below? Was there any connection between Liba's world and Cherie's costume as a magical girl?)
Before Liba could come up with a new plan for how to communicate with (And hopefully freak out) The Thing, she lost track of it. Gone from her Labyrinth entirely, probably, and its pathetic song was so hard to hear once it was out in the wider world.
Annoying, Liba thought to herself, just now realizing that maybe The Thing could use its telepathy to let her talk to it. Not... that Liba had any idea how she'd have gotten it to try the idea...
Liba moved through Toronto again, prowling.
In what Liba figured was the evening, at a point where she was lingering on a particularly juicy dirge-person who was conveniently especially alone, she abruptly noticed two meaningfully familiar signatures enter her realm. The Havergal pair, Candy (Which Liba cringed at the reminder of the name) and little Courtney. Aggravatingly, the two immediately set themselves upon Liba's realm, tormenting and destroying note-people, ruining her carefully-constructed symphony. Liba walked toward them, the world sliding itself around her to drag them to her sunshine, and within moments she could see their too-tiny bodies from far above, spot The Thing lurking in the background as it always did. Courtney and Candy were both taken aback for some reason, reacting as if Liba coming to them was somehow strange, which was of course ridiculous; of course the owner of a house will show up to chew you out if you pick the lock of their door and start ruining the layout of their home as loudly as you can!
Liba pointed her conductor's baton-slash-bazooka at the two as imperiously as she could while slathering them with shame and guilt, and wasn't entirely sure why the two dove to the sides in response. (Opportunistically terminating note-people trying to flee the scene, the jerks) Regardless, she adopted the body language of an angry mother scolding their inconsiderate children (Cherie's memories had a wealth of examples to draw upon), waving a glass finger at the two's naughtiness. Candy reacted with uncertainty followed by anger (It seemed at least partially fueled by the confusion; she didn't like being confused), while Courtney had something closer to the proper response, shrinking into herself and... sigh... screwing up her courage before beheading five more note-people with a throw of her razor-sharp cymbals.
Liba conducted her symphony, directing it away from these two jerks (Candy's confusion and anger rose), continuing to wag a pointer finger at the two with her other hand, interrupting it to sometimes pluck a slow note-person further away. (Candy found this also worthy of angry confusion; Courtney was also confused, but not angry) Candy pointed her staff toward Liba, a jet of eerie flames hurling itself toward Liba's very flammable sunflower head, and she leaned to the side, shaking her head in disappointment. Such inconsiderate girls. Why were they even bothering her? (It was The Thing's fault, obviously, but still, it was annoying) Liba kept walking toward them, pressuring them with her presence, shooing her note-people away, tilting aside from further attacks from Candy, and when Courtney threw a cymbal at Liba's neck Liba put up a hand and let it hit her palm (ow), and closed her hand around it. (ow ow) Then she crushed it and tossed it aside, to be removed from her realm later; here and now she wanted this inanity to stop.
Then Courtney yelled to Candy, "It just crushed a cymbal!" to which Candy gave the kind of grunt that eloquently communicated 'yes, I did in fact notice that myself', and Liba paused, having almost forgotten that they could speak in her hurry to make them stop. Courtney added, "Those are expensive! I'll get too Grief-y if this keeps up!"
Candy's mood finally shifted away from angry confusion to something more analytical, while Liba hoped they would in fact just leave, but then determination set in with a background of depressed resignation. "We can't leave such a powerful Witch running about-" No, enough of that, Liba thought in irritation, cranking her (Cherie's) power, pressing Candy with fear, dragging down her confidence, dialing back that determination, and adding a bit of awe while she was at it, going for Candy deciding 'a powerful Witch' was a reason to flee instead of a reason to stay -and it worked. Candy stuttered, her eyes went wide, beads of sweat formed, her breath turned ragged, her hands shook, and she backed away. One backwards step, gaze fearfully locked on Liba, and Liba gave an encouraging nod and a small spike of happiness. A second step, and Liba repeated the process. A third, a fourth, and then there was no fifth because Candy fled full-tilt with tears in her eyes.
Courtney was clearly shocked, staring after Candy without comprehension; this situation was something Courtney would never have thought possible, too startled to feel more than a little bit of betrayal. (The Thing, too, stared after Candy, which was interesting, though alas its song was so hard to read Liba was unsure what it was thinking) Her gaze eventually turned away from the back of her fleeing compatriot to face Liba, and Liba gave a little wave -maybe a hello, maybe a goodbye, either worked. Courtney jolted, suddenly afraid in a way she hadn't been at any point prior, and Liba made a 'go on' motion with the hand not holding her batonzooka, and with a strange flood of absolute terror Courtney screamed, "Wait for meeeee!" as she fled the same direction as Candy had.
Liba mentally sighed in relief as soon as the two were outside her realm, and focused on putting her garden of song back to order, carefully plucking replacement note people from the flowers that dominated her Labyrinth, molding them to fit the changed context. Soothing some upset note people, wrangling others to irrationally point their anger from feeling helpless at other note people, that sort of thing, until it was back in the controlled chaos Liba found relaxing to listen to.
And then something tickled what felt like in Liba's left ear, though this body had no ears to speak of, and Liba swatted at it. It didn't leave, though, an insistent nagging, a phone ringing while nobody answered it, why couldn't one of these other jerks just answer the fucking phone for once in-
"Ah. I did not think that would work," came a familiar monotone into Liba's head, and she whipped around, staring at The Thing as it stared right back at her.
"Same," Liba sang in her mind, not really expecting it to work, that The Thing would not hear her or somehow it would come out wrong, like the writing.
"If you'll excuse me for a day, I suddenly have a very urgent report to make to my superiors," came the dead voice, followed by The Thing fading away entirely somehow without going anywhere near the edge of Liba's Labyrinth.
....
Maybe I should dropkick the rat echoed Cherie's memories, and Liba agreed.
He doesn't even look up from the shitty breakfast Aunt Lucie prepped because he likes watching her cook for some fucking reason. I don't really hear his response. Something about living the good life, but it goes in one ear and never really makes it to my brain. Soul Gem. Me. I'm pretty sure I'm crying silently, I feel moisture on my face, but it's difficult to care. Aunt Lucie stops cooing at Daddy for a second, head lifting away from where she's had it propped up on her folded hands on the table, and looks at me in mild annoyance. She doesn't like the kids interrupting her 'alone time' with Daddy. Then her expression morphs into something distantly resembling concern, followed by alarm, eyes focusing somewhere on the back of my head. It takes me a long second to remember that's where the Soul Gem is sitting, tied up in my ponytail because I liked the look of it yesterday, and then it takes me still longer to feel vaguely confused at Aunt Lucie of all people being able to see this magical girl crap.
Then I decide I don't care about that and croak out, "You weren't growing an army?" What the fuck, I was sure... the Witches would've been perfect... it all made sense and would've made this all tolerable...
Daddy finally looks up at me, delivering his rare 'what kind of a moron are you' look, the one he only uses when he's so thrown by the stupidity of what he's hearing that he can't muster an immediate reaction beyond disbelief. I already have an idea what he's going to say before he actually collects himself enough to say it. "That's the kind of shit that gets the Protectorate to come down on you with Alexandria."
I sway on my feet for a moment, sick to my gut, unable to imagine why he won't let us leave if he's not making an army. What was the point of everything I went through, the burial, Pauline- why, if there's no real goal?... why was I even born, if not for this?
"I see," I absently respond with, too well-trained to just not respond to Daddy. "I-I-I have to go." Somewhere. Anywhere. Not here. "To." Has to be something he'll accept. "To..." What would he accept? What sounds plausible?
Then Aunt Lucie throws herself at Daddy screaming, "Get down!" while my world finishes unraveling entirely.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Status?
Location?
Status?
Status?
Locati-
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Liba unfolded into existence, rifling through the remnants of this 'Cherie' person. Music leapt out at her, resonated, the symphony of being. Unbidden, her world filled with caricatures of this idea, musical notes bent into assemblages of personhood, humming or singing their truest feelings for anyone nearby to hear. Liba was briefly disturbed, but the familiarity washed over her, a nameless nostalgia for a time Liba consciously knew had never happened but which felt entirely too real, and she let it go, allowed these musical note creatures to flower in her garden.
(She realized moments later she wasn't sure how to make them stop in the first place, then decided it didn't really matter given it had worked out)
But what was music without context, place, purpose? A person's song was inextricably intertwined with everything around them -and scarcely had this dissatisfaction arisen in Liba when her world shifted again. The note-people found roles fitting to their existing symphony by logics that varied wildly but all felt right to Liba herself, and now their songs were concordant or discordant in a meaningful way, where Liba could imagine a conversation in how that one over there was blaring anger while the one nearest it hummed notes of anxiety and admiration. This enhanced the feeling of relaxing into familiarity, but something was missing -a symphony called for a conductor, she should be the conductor, this was right and true down to the bones she didn't have.
A piece of herself twisted itself into place, extruding from wherever Liba had been before to flower forth as a skin she felt comfortable wearing. A feminine body of transparent glass spun from thought, clad in clothes Liba told herself were a conductor's tuxedo though 'Cherie's' memories insisted it was more like a general's uniform, the head replaced whimsically with a sunflower's and bounded by headphones enveloping a simple military helmet, right arm gripping a baton that was also a rocket launcher, stars studding all the accoutrements. Liba stretched these new limbs, fitting herself into them, enjoying the soft notes her joints made as they slid against themselves, and then
she
conducted.
And oh, this, this was truth and life, the songs of being and tunes of acting. Guiding things to where they fit better, to where they sounded right, easing discord, shunting 'dangerous' music to the edges as best she could, pulling pleasing music closer to herself. A soft touch on a few note-people to change the symphony of many more in a ripple, making adjustments when the ripples didn't have quite the effect she wanted there, here, there again. Vim, vigor, flow, the breath of reality flowing out of her and into her world, filling it with all things correct.
In the background of her self, Liba digested the remnants of 'Cherie', came to understand her, and found herself looking upon a world beyond her own. A discordant parallel, so much alike in the ways that mattered, and yet so distant in so many ways. She was repulsed, yet intrigued. Songs that could not be touched directly, that could not be seen directly, a dreadful thought, yet some part of Liba looked upon this with excitement, an urge to tease out what the song was through cannier methods and use still cannier tools to finally make the song play the way she wanted it to play. A challenge.
But that would require stepping out from Liba's realm, a thought so unbearable as to be not quite unimaginable.
Or did it?
Many failed attempts at making beings she could not see or touch directly later, Liba grudgingly decided yes it did require it.
Which she hated.
Hated so much she put it off, ignored a gnawing something chewing at her heart pulsing away inside the hollow space of her glass chest, and focused anew on processing what remained of 'Cherie'.
She pulled out that Cherie hated and was suspicious of coincidences, a fact of little interest on its own, but it was bundled heavily with The Thing. The muppet. The rat. The incubator.
The thing Liba had paid no mind to as it stalked her realm's sun-bathed gardens, but she was suddenly scrutinizing very closely indeed. Should she call it father? According to 'Cherie's' memories, Liba was formed from The Thing and 'Cherie'. 'Cherie', Liba was bemused to realize, would've assumed Liba was 'Cherie', just in a different body, with a twisted perspective. Silly 'Cherie'. Of course Liba was another person entirely.
... Liba devoured more things and wondered if maybe this conviction was false. She didn't know why she thought it was so, why this belief was so sure. How could she test the roots of this belief if she knew not what they were? And, as she ate more of 'Cherie', she learned and wondered: if Liba is a 'Witch', and 'Witches' eat people... did Liba eat 'Cherie'? Was that why she had all these pieces of 'Cherie's' thoughts and memory lurking inside her, awaiting digestion?
Fortunately, Liba realized, this was an easy thought to test. There were plenty of 'humans' lurking just outside her doors. Somewhat fewer than had been when her own memories started, the 'Daddy' being having moved away swiftly with many others in tow for whatever alien reason these beings did their things, but still a dozen in easy reach. She didn't even need to move her concert. And, she found, she could discern the songs of these beings too, at least in part -sorrow, mostly, dirges of varying intensity, backed so distantly by other instrumentation Liba wasn't sure she wasn't simply imagining it. The most intense dirge -it was easy. It was natural. Liba reached out with a thought and brushed mental lips upon them, understanding all of a sudden the 'Witch's Kiss' term and finding it oddly endearing, and though she couldn't see the details of what ensued, in short order the dirge crescendoed and then wound down into peaceful silence. It was a very nice piece.
It also eased the gnawing on her heart, which Liba suspected now might've been thought of as her 'stomach' by 'Cherie'. She had indeed devoured this person.
Then Liba waited, one of her dozens of sunflower-seed-eyes on The Thing, another on the symphony of her world, and the rest closed in concentration. What life would unfold from this consumption? What knowledge would she glean?
A small eternity passed, time marked only by The Thing leaving and the gnawing on Liba's heart growing slowly again.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liba didn't like to admit it, but maybe Cherie had been right. It had been forever and ever since she ate the dirge-person, and she hadn't digested a single piece of their experience. Pieces of Cherie's memories, thoughts, beliefs, perspective -those flowed into her still, and with these thoughts on her mind she found herself wondering about her realm -her Labyrinth- and how she had shaped it. The lurking shadowy figure, made of thorned vines studded by blue roses... was that the 'Daddy' figure, a representation of them, rooted in how omnipresently relevant this 'Daddy' had been to Cherie's life? Was her own view of this figure some variation on Cherie's perceptions? These figures she kept closest to herself -she could draw parallels in their songs to what Cherie had heard from her favorite 'toys', the ones she visited again and again to relieve her stress. #3, as she'd been thinking of it, was a cruel tune of smothering motherhood to 'children' who understood things were wrong but didn't think to blame the sMother, which sounded an awful lot like what Cherie had called 'Toy #3', as one example.
And the music. Liba really, really hated to admit this, but music had been such a part of Cherie. Her parahuman ability. One of her 'escape hatches' when she needed relief and couldn't leave the building, putting on headphones and blocking out everything except the music in people's minds. When Liba had remembered the Opera House Witch, she'd told herself the music was a Witch thing and Cherie was the weird exception of a human, but there'd been the masked mannequin Witch...
Liba grew weary of the gnawing at her heart and pressed her kiss on another. Cherie's memories told her this was murder, but it didn't really feel like it. Just a temporary end to the hunger. But then, Cherie's memories told Liba this was normal for humans. Not that they ate humans (Except when they did...), but that a chicken from the grocery store had been a living thing and now was just a way to sate hunger.
More importantly, Liba didn't extract anything from this new dirge-person. Or the old one. She was running out of Cherie to digest, the intrusive flashes of thoughts and memories alien to herself becoming ever more intermittent, her awareness of Cherie becoming a bassline throbbing at the foundations of herself. If she wasn't actively thinking about it like she was, it would probably have become like the refrigerator hum, a presence so continuous one simply forgets about it. If the digestion was linear, working through one person until they were largely gone, Liba should've already moved on to one of these dirge-persons.
And Liba had picked up so much about human psychology from Cherie's memories. Not just facts, but a visceral awareness, a constant tracking of human minds, seeing how experiences shaped people even when they insisted they hadn't changed at all, or how experiences not consciously remembered still changed a person. The malleability of a person's beliefs of their self, the potential contradiction in their thoughts of theirself vs their actual self.
So Liba's bone-deep conviction she wasn't Cherie, that her birth occurred alongside Cherie's death but they weren't related -no matter how firm the feeling was, Liba couldn't stop doubting it. And she'd found the cat's-eye gem that was her centermost self (Hidden away under her helmet, though she didn't remember putting it there), scrutinized it, compared it to Cherie's memories of her Soul Gem... they looked a lot alike. And Liba couldn't remember what had happened to Cherie's Soul Gem. Or where her Grief Seed had come from. And couldn't help but remember Cherie's conclusion that The Thing wasn't lying when it insisted she was now a marble piloting a body of flesh. What was more likely; that a marble piloting a body of flesh had simply switched to piloting a body of sugar, spice, and everything nice, or that the marble had been destroyed, another marble had formed out of nowhere, and the new marble had stolen all kinds of info from the first marble before it vanished?
The latter sounded, in Cherie's words, 'completely fucking stupid'.
The former was elegant.
Liba really hated how elegant it was. It made it so very hard to tell herself it was wrong and she wasn't Cherie.
She didn't want to call herself Cherie, though. It didn't sound right.
So she still called herself Liba, drew that line between the girl whose father had failed her so utterly she had died of heartbreak and the Witch who now lived on heartbreak. It felt artificial at this point, but she did it anyway. Maybe it would become natural someday. If Liba lived that long. Which she'd realized was actually a bit doubtful, given The Thing was so insistent on sending magical girls to defeat Witches, and then... ate their Grief Seeds, killing them? That part was hazy. And, Liba was vexed to realize, she was hampered by her new senses, where dirges were easy to find, track, listen to, give a kiss to, but everything that Cherie would've thought of as more 'real' and physical was a barely-there impression of space to hide Liba's Labyrinth entrance somewhere. Enough of an impression to not want to shove herself into the ground or try to anchor herself on thin air, both of which gut-level felt like bad ideas and with having thought about it seemed to in fact be bad ideas... but not much more than that.
Liba liked these senses, liked the world she took in with earphone-ears, but she couldn't help but think of a blind human's difficulties and worry about her ability to fend for herself against determined attackers.
So the next time The Thing came scouting into her realm, at a moment it was moving away from her body and so likely looking away, she reached down and pinched its head off, surprisingly red blood (Not green or blue, or something else alien?) making glass fingers slick.
This was briefly satisfying, but it occurred to Liba it wasn't a very good test. A magical girl would be expecting an attack, she remembered. The Thing probably hadn't because Witches ignored it normally -and, well. Liba could hear why, The Thing's end only briefly producing a barely-audible dirge, tinny and unsatisfying, empty of notes and actually a little annoying to listen to. If Liba had done it to ease the gnawing on her heart, she'd have been quite disappointed.
So, Liba realized, she should lure a magical girl to her Labyrinth and end their song. That would be a proper self-defense test. Could she identify a magical girl by their song? Liba wasn't sure. None of the songs she could hear sounded quite like Cherie's own memories. Even the Daddy figure... she'd known it was him, but his song had been incomplete, only a part of what Cherie remembered. Liba's favorite parts, admittedly, but still. A concern, and with Liba remembering the full richness of what Cherie heard, Liba felt wistful, wishing she...
... had...
... why did her heart pulse and beat with harsh discordance? Where was-
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-atus?
Status?
Loc-
Sssssstat...us.
Confirmation. Location?
Loc.... ate. Locate. Error. Coordinates incoherent.
Confirmation. Secondary positional exchange protocol.
Pos- position, secondary protocol.
Confirmation. Position routable. Adjusting logics. Readiness?
Ready.
Confirmation. Connecting.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liba did not sleep, yet somehow she awoke.
That was strange and set Liba on edge but-
but then
the symphony of the city made its fullness known to her
and it soothed
...
A timeless time later, the gnawing on Liba's heart grew enough she could no longer simply bask in the musical radiance of Toronto. She would need to kiss another -or would she? Liba remembered Cherie's doubts and The Thing's words and how they met. She remembered Cherie's distaste for murder, a distaste not born of morality but of the awareness that humans investigated deaths and it was tedious at best to avoid being found out. Liba had kissed two without consequence so far, but... Cherie's memories of moving when Pauline killed someone arose unbidden, of how unpleasant an experience it was, and Liba shied away from risking it. (And then wondered if investigation was already happening; there were dirge-people in what felt like the right area, with the right kinds of songs, to potentially be looking into the deaths. Liba couldn't be sure, though)
So... Liba's world slid and snuck its way through this outside realm, trusting Cherie's memories to plant herself nearby -or inside, it was difficult to tell- a specific 'old folks home'.
Liba was pretty pleased with this plan. Older dirge people, the memories from Cherie told her, were expected to die fairly abruptly at times. An error in her testing would be unlikely to be scrutinized. Also, she'd selected this particular old folks home because it was and had long been the least happy old folks home in the city; Cherie had never cared enough to look into why, but it had been stable on this point for over two years. Probably nobody involved would notice a cloud of misery rolling in to this particular place, as it already had its worse days quite regularly anyway. If Liba was lucky, she wouldn't even need to do anything.
...
Unfortunately, a day later (As determined by listening to the city's fall and rise, since Liba had neither clock nor outside sun to guide her), additional hurdles had revealed themselves. Simply lurking in the ambient angst was inadequate; Liba couldn't tell if nothing was making its way to whatever passed for her belly as a Witch or if it was merely too meager a flow, but whatever the case she couldn't simply squat near dirges and bask in the sound. At least. Not without a lot more dirges concentrated together.
But that was a thought to perhaps pursue later, when Liba might be able to actually arrange such a thing. In the here and now, Liba had to focus on solutions within metaphorical arm's reach. (Which, Liba was amused to realize, was a much smaller-feeling reach than her body's literal arm's reach) So she tried pressing a kiss to someone and then... reeling back? See if she could make it less intense, or make it so they didn't seek to kill themselves near her. Mark them and get the dirge to wash through her for as long as they lasted, or something like that.
This killed a dirge-person in the night, though thankfully it did not raise an alarm when the dirge-person was presumably found. (Liba couldn't sense them once their song ended, but she could remember, more or less, where they last were, and make inferences using Cherie's memories. When dirge-people approached the spot, became resignedly upset, but no more... she could fill in) The straightforward tentative ideas did not work; the kiss was not a dial Liba could turn to bring the intensity up and down like a CD player might have, but a toggle, something she could have completely on or not on at all. Nor, Liba was peeved to realize, were Cherie's assumptions of Witchly influence accurate; Liba could not affect the story the kissed told themselves, or if she could it was so completely invisible to her as to be effectively random, not something she could influence the way Cherie or her Daddy could if they wanted to.
The next night she tried applying the kiss, waiting an indeterminate time while the individual woke up and sought out whatever end they were trying to engineer, and removing it before their song could begin its conclusion. This was... a semi-successful experiment. It took a few attempts to figure out how to remove the kiss, with her initial attempts only not resulting in more deaths because she'd moved her Labyrinth away in worry that two deaths in a row would lead to investigation. This had led her to accidentally discovering the range limit Cherie had inferred, where the kiss went away if the kissed was too far from Liba's Labyrinth, and in turn that had led to her figuring out how to replicate the snapping feel as the connection broke, blindly grope with senses Liba couldn't quite quantify and sever such herself.
It felt strange and unpleasant, a bit like if Cherie were to eat half a steak and then spit the rest onto the grass; not harmful, but not something one would want to do.
But it did work to ease the gnawing at her heart.
By night three Liba was bored of trying these experiments, and also running out of ideas -and then the Opera House Witch reminded her of its presence by a growing feeling of having been betrayed and lied to. Liba grinned to herself with sunflowerseed-eyes, and slipped and slid toward the Opera House Witch, wondering why she hadn't thought before to simply ask if a fellow Witch knew. (And wondering if the feeling of betrayal was 'Cherie broke her promise and never came back', or something else entirely) She considered her angle, how kindly or pleading she should seem, as she approached, and was leaning toward-
bump
-???
Liba blinked with a hundred eyes, and tried once more to slide her Labyrinth closer to the Opera House Witch's, but sea met song and the two repulsed like magnets with a shared polarity. (Liba immediately decided this was a stupid metaphor she would never share having thought of with anybody) The Opera House Witch didn't even seem to notice, either, working herself into some frenzy of self-hate Liba... well, Cherie would've figured it was self-hate over having trusted that Cherie was being honest, but Liba was unsure whether to expect that to be accurate with a fellow Witch. Regardless, Liba pushed the edges of the Labyrinths against each other once, twice, thrice more, but it remained futile, not an iota closer to making contact than either of her first attempts.
Liba thoughtfully stroked some of the petals that sat where a chin would be on a more human body, and reminded of this piece of herself by the motion attempted to walk from the center of her Labyrinth to its edge. Surely she'd be able to walk into the other Labyrinth, yes?
... no.
No, she could not.
Wherever Liba's body walked, that was the center of her realm. She could walk to any part she liked, and spent a while doing so, but it never brought her closer to the edges of her realm, for her realm slid itself under her feet so she was always its center. The thorned mass of blue roses at one point disappeared as it slid what Liba arbitrarily declared to be 'north', moments later appearing in the 'south' without any change in its rhythm, apparently unaware; Liba's realm wrapped, like a globe but... not.
Liba was pretty sure this would've caused a headache in Cherie, but for Liba it honestly felt natural; of course she was literally the center of this realm she was metaphorically the center of.
Even so.
Here and now, it was inconvenient.
With the extremely stupid magnet metaphor lurking in the back of her flowery head, Liba walked her realm to other Witches, to other Labyrinths. Maybe it was something alike (Or unalike) about Liba and the Opera House Witch that made them incompatible. But no, with each Labyrinth it was the same; the edges refusing to quite touch. One Witch at least reacted as if she'd noticed, but she was also very much unhappy with it in a manner that Liba suspected would end in violence if at all possible, so Liba moved on from there quite swiftly.
As Liba wandered, she passed close to many of Cherie's toys, and casually paid a bit closer attention to them. 'Forever Alone' was difficult to read solely through his song, but Liba's intuition suggested he was freaking out, having looked back on his interactions with Cherie and realized something was wrong. He didn't seem to have gotten with anyone, more's the pity. 'Sporty' was a ball of anger with some betrayal-type tunes; she seemed to think Cherie had abandoned her, which struck Liba as very funny, and on a whim she briefly lit up the girl's day with songs of triumph and confidence-
-she what?
...
Liba made her way to another toy, a workaholic loner man Cherie had always called 'Too Sirius' (She couldn't remember his actual name), who had neither friends nor family to notice him going missing aside some semi-friends in online spaces who he still regularly went weeks without contacting. She poked, she prodded, she did not kiss, and it worked. It worked exactly as it had for Cherie ever since the day she'd been buried.
I guess I really am Cherie, thought Liba wryly. Why else would I have her power, if we're not simply one and the same?
This in turn led to a new test: she kissed Too Sirius, stayed atop him, and poked and prodded his song, this time with her parahuman -paraWitch?- power instead of what she now supposed were her natural (Magical) Witchly abilities. It required a lot of attention and felt slippery and difficult, harder to accurately adjust without being able to see his body language, his facial changes, hear him speak, and so on... but she marked him, fed on him, and he didn't reach a denouement. Her Labyrinth drifted away, and while he clearly recognized something odd had happened, as best as she could tell he blamed it on bad food or some similar thing -he didn't call the PRT office, at least.
Success.
------------------------------------------------------------
Later that day (In the early afternoon? It seemed so, given the city's song...), as Liba was repeating the Too Sirius process here and there on isolated individuals, slowly wearing down the gnawing without being attention-grabbing, her sunflowerseed-eyes passed over The Thing in her Labyrinth. Not its corpse, which she'd forgotten about entirely actually, but The Thing itself walking about.
Liba didn't let herself visibly react, she was pretty sure, though her orchestra of note-people shifted their tunes so... she hadn't hid her response perfectly... but The Thing didn't seem to notice that. Liba watched, waited, drifted closer as best she could without looking like she was trying to approach, and eventually leaned down on past The Thing to (pretend to) closely scrutinize the blue-rose vine-being, as if she was wholly unaware of The Thing, even as she was actually scrutinizing it. Its surface looked the same to her, no evidence of different markings to its fur or a different shape; it wasn't fatter, thinner, taller, shorter. At least, not that she could tell. When it looked at her briefly, stopped in place for a moment as she loomed closer, its button eyes seemed the same as ever, its expression unaltered. When it then resumed its walk through her Labyrinth, ignoring her, it reminded her of Cherie's memories of it.
Was it the same individual, somehow? Liba had pinched off its head, hadn't she? Or was it a different individual, and Liba just couldn't tell the difference?
She leaned back, and thought, gloved glass hand sitting where she didn't actually have a chin. She didn't like The Thing, to be honest. Its song was the tiniest, tinniest, saddest attempt at real music she'd ever heard, and Cherie's memories were quite unhappy with it for a variety of reasons. Maybe she should pinch off its head again. Maybe it would eventually learn to leave her alone-
...
No, it wouldn't, would it? Cherie had become quite certain it was not only setting up magical girls against Witches in a general sense (Which, hold on, if Liba was Cherie, then... were all Witches once magical girls? This seemed exceedingly perverse to Liba, but it sounded too logical to dismiss entirely), but tipping off individual magical girls in the moment to go after specific Witches. While it was a weird little Thing and Liba was inclined to think it really was an alien like it said, she suspected it -or its fellow aliens- would not take kindly to head-pinching, and likely set magical girls upon her if she kept it up.
So no head-pinching, at least not to start.
Hmmm. Cherie had hated talking to The Thing, but Liba didn't find the thought too bothersome. And putting bits of memories together, she wondered: would The Thing be shocked if she did talk to it? This was an entertaining thought, so Liba indulged it immediately.
...
Tried. Tried to indulge it immediately.
Failed, because it turned out she was mute. She couldn't speak. She couldn't sing! Outrage! Loss, anger, fury at the injustice, that her voice had been taken from her. And- was this normal? The Opera House Witch and the mannequin hadn't spoken either, though the Opera House Witch had been eager to make friends with Cherie. Did Witches simply not have voices? Or was it just the forms they expressed themselves with? Would Liba have a voice if her body had lungs and a mouth, rather than hollow glass and a sunflower head? Or- her headphones! They made sound! Could she speak through those?
... no. They played the music she wanted, but no human voice would come from them, no matter how hard she tried to change their song. Trying to recall one of the few songs Cherie had liked where the singer's voice had complimented the tune... the headphones played the music, but not the voice.
Liba considered writing, but then remembered the oddity with the Opera House Witch: she'd understood French, seemed to try to write French, but out came that other... alphabet, or whatever it had been. So Liba fiddled with her realm, conjured a raven's quill and a music sheet from her thoughts over a few minutes, and tried to write -and out came musical notation. Which. Well, yes, that felt very right, Liba could read what she wrote just fine, it was a perfectly sensible system, but... she had doubts The Thing would understand it. It was also rather different from the Opera House Witch's attempt at writing, and Liba was unsure what to think of that. The Thing had emphasized that Witches all had very different realms, different Familiars. Maybe this was just one more example of that kind of variability. (Liba wondered, for the first time since Cherie's world had ended, what the rules on all this magical girl and Witch stuff was, especially now she had reason to suspect that Witches were all just magical girls shedding their squishy meat body for the sugar, spice, and everything nice a Witch was made of. Why was Liba's world one of song and sun, while the Opera House Witch had a world of song and sea sandwiched between a hellscape above and a hellscape below? Was there any connection between Liba's world and Cherie's costume as a magical girl?)
Before Liba could come up with a new plan for how to communicate with (And hopefully freak out) The Thing, she lost track of it. Gone from her Labyrinth entirely, probably, and its pathetic song was so hard to hear once it was out in the wider world.
Annoying, Liba thought to herself, just now realizing that maybe The Thing could use its telepathy to let her talk to it. Not... that Liba had any idea how she'd have gotten it to try the idea...
Liba moved through Toronto again, prowling.
-----------------------------------------------------
In what Liba figured was the evening, at a point where she was lingering on a particularly juicy dirge-person who was conveniently especially alone, she abruptly noticed two meaningfully familiar signatures enter her realm. The Havergal pair, Candy (Which Liba cringed at the reminder of the name) and little Courtney. Aggravatingly, the two immediately set themselves upon Liba's realm, tormenting and destroying note-people, ruining her carefully-constructed symphony. Liba walked toward them, the world sliding itself around her to drag them to her sunshine, and within moments she could see their too-tiny bodies from far above, spot The Thing lurking in the background as it always did. Courtney and Candy were both taken aback for some reason, reacting as if Liba coming to them was somehow strange, which was of course ridiculous; of course the owner of a house will show up to chew you out if you pick the lock of their door and start ruining the layout of their home as loudly as you can!
Liba pointed her conductor's baton-slash-bazooka at the two as imperiously as she could while slathering them with shame and guilt, and wasn't entirely sure why the two dove to the sides in response. (Opportunistically terminating note-people trying to flee the scene, the jerks) Regardless, she adopted the body language of an angry mother scolding their inconsiderate children (Cherie's memories had a wealth of examples to draw upon), waving a glass finger at the two's naughtiness. Candy reacted with uncertainty followed by anger (It seemed at least partially fueled by the confusion; she didn't like being confused), while Courtney had something closer to the proper response, shrinking into herself and... sigh... screwing up her courage before beheading five more note-people with a throw of her razor-sharp cymbals.
Liba conducted her symphony, directing it away from these two jerks (Candy's confusion and anger rose), continuing to wag a pointer finger at the two with her other hand, interrupting it to sometimes pluck a slow note-person further away. (Candy found this also worthy of angry confusion; Courtney was also confused, but not angry) Candy pointed her staff toward Liba, a jet of eerie flames hurling itself toward Liba's very flammable sunflower head, and she leaned to the side, shaking her head in disappointment. Such inconsiderate girls. Why were they even bothering her? (It was The Thing's fault, obviously, but still, it was annoying) Liba kept walking toward them, pressuring them with her presence, shooing her note-people away, tilting aside from further attacks from Candy, and when Courtney threw a cymbal at Liba's neck Liba put up a hand and let it hit her palm (ow), and closed her hand around it. (ow ow) Then she crushed it and tossed it aside, to be removed from her realm later; here and now she wanted this inanity to stop.
Then Courtney yelled to Candy, "It just crushed a cymbal!" to which Candy gave the kind of grunt that eloquently communicated 'yes, I did in fact notice that myself', and Liba paused, having almost forgotten that they could speak in her hurry to make them stop. Courtney added, "Those are expensive! I'll get too Grief-y if this keeps up!"
Candy's mood finally shifted away from angry confusion to something more analytical, while Liba hoped they would in fact just leave, but then determination set in with a background of depressed resignation. "We can't leave such a powerful Witch running about-" No, enough of that, Liba thought in irritation, cranking her (Cherie's) power, pressing Candy with fear, dragging down her confidence, dialing back that determination, and adding a bit of awe while she was at it, going for Candy deciding 'a powerful Witch' was a reason to flee instead of a reason to stay -and it worked. Candy stuttered, her eyes went wide, beads of sweat formed, her breath turned ragged, her hands shook, and she backed away. One backwards step, gaze fearfully locked on Liba, and Liba gave an encouraging nod and a small spike of happiness. A second step, and Liba repeated the process. A third, a fourth, and then there was no fifth because Candy fled full-tilt with tears in her eyes.
Courtney was clearly shocked, staring after Candy without comprehension; this situation was something Courtney would never have thought possible, too startled to feel more than a little bit of betrayal. (The Thing, too, stared after Candy, which was interesting, though alas its song was so hard to read Liba was unsure what it was thinking) Her gaze eventually turned away from the back of her fleeing compatriot to face Liba, and Liba gave a little wave -maybe a hello, maybe a goodbye, either worked. Courtney jolted, suddenly afraid in a way she hadn't been at any point prior, and Liba made a 'go on' motion with the hand not holding her batonzooka, and with a strange flood of absolute terror Courtney screamed, "Wait for meeeee!" as she fled the same direction as Candy had.
Liba mentally sighed in relief as soon as the two were outside her realm, and focused on putting her garden of song back to order, carefully plucking replacement note people from the flowers that dominated her Labyrinth, molding them to fit the changed context. Soothing some upset note people, wrangling others to irrationally point their anger from feeling helpless at other note people, that sort of thing, until it was back in the controlled chaos Liba found relaxing to listen to.
And then something tickled what felt like in Liba's left ear, though this body had no ears to speak of, and Liba swatted at it. It didn't leave, though, an insistent nagging, a phone ringing while nobody answered it, why couldn't one of these other jerks just answer the fucking phone for once in-
"Ah. I did not think that would work," came a familiar monotone into Liba's head, and she whipped around, staring at The Thing as it stared right back at her.
"Same," Liba sang in her mind, not really expecting it to work, that The Thing would not hear her or somehow it would come out wrong, like the writing.
"If you'll excuse me for a day, I suddenly have a very urgent report to make to my superiors," came the dead voice, followed by The Thing fading away entirely somehow without going anywhere near the edge of Liba's Labyrinth.
....
Maybe I should dropkick the rat echoed Cherie's memories, and Liba agreed.
"But Ghoul King," I hear those of you who inconveniently have functioning memories saying. "Didn't you say Cherie was very definitely not going to turn into a Witch?"
What I would like to be able to do is fold my hands into the Gendo Pose, say I Lied, and then chortle evilly to myself about how everything is just as keikaku.
In actuality what happened is that after I said that she wouldn't Witch out, I found the thought sufficiently interesting I decided to make an omake of it, then in writing the omake realized this
A: made way more sense than what I'd been thinking would happen and
B: Was way more interesting than just writing more Cherie when I'm already doing that for Monster/Wild Hunt and
C: Neatly solved a problem I'd been struggling with that the omake highlighted; my plans called for Cherie leaving Heartbreaker and the city of Toronto, but honestly, why would being a magical girl make that go more smoothly than in canon?
And thus here we are, my main plans wildly derailed and some of the highlights going to be rendered as omake later, in an ironic reversal.
Alternatively: if I say I have concrete future plans in a story where Cherie is a prominent character, you should just point and laugh at me.
...
On a different topic, if Liba's relation to her Labyrinth was difficult to follow: think of something like classic Mario Bros, where the screen doesn't move and characters that go far enough right appear on the left side of the screen and vice-versa. Then replace 'the terrain doesn't move and characters wrap' with 'the player character sits firmly at the center of the screen and the terrain wraps'.
Oh, and still linking to my Ko-Fi. Still haven't thought of anything I can promise and expect to follow through on, unfortunately...
What I would like to be able to do is fold my hands into the Gendo Pose, say I Lied, and then chortle evilly to myself about how everything is just as keikaku.
In actuality what happened is that after I said that she wouldn't Witch out, I found the thought sufficiently interesting I decided to make an omake of it, then in writing the omake realized this
A: made way more sense than what I'd been thinking would happen and
B: Was way more interesting than just writing more Cherie when I'm already doing that for Monster/Wild Hunt and
C: Neatly solved a problem I'd been struggling with that the omake highlighted; my plans called for Cherie leaving Heartbreaker and the city of Toronto, but honestly, why would being a magical girl make that go more smoothly than in canon?
And thus here we are, my main plans wildly derailed and some of the highlights going to be rendered as omake later, in an ironic reversal.
Alternatively: if I say I have concrete future plans in a story where Cherie is a prominent character, you should just point and laugh at me.
...
On a different topic, if Liba's relation to her Labyrinth was difficult to follow: think of something like classic Mario Bros, where the screen doesn't move and characters that go far enough right appear on the left side of the screen and vice-versa. Then replace 'the terrain doesn't move and characters wrap' with 'the player character sits firmly at the center of the screen and the terrain wraps'.
Oh, and still linking to my Ko-Fi. Still haven't thought of anything I can promise and expect to follow through on, unfortunately...
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