You stare down at the Witch, or at least you
assume that's the Witch, bobbing gently in the bubbling, spitting pit of oil beneath, your wings beating to keep you aloft. You don't particularly feel like touching down on the metal grill beneath you.
A vague thought at the back your mind wonders about convection. If that's boiling oil down there, shouldn't it be
blisteringly hot up here? It's barely warm enough in here to bring a light sheen of sweat to your face.
Then again, magic.
You take a deep breath, more as punctuation than anything, and immediately regret it as you get a lungful of the noxious, grease laden air. The breath reverses itself and you gasp shallowly instead.
... if this Witch is trying to disgust you to death, it's not doing too badly.
Reaching out with your
other senses, you take a
look at the Witch.
In the depths of the roiling, turbulent oil, you find a bubbling,
hissing speck, the abyssal wellspring of Grief that is the Witch. A sepulchral voice whispers in your mind, a Name running icy fingers down your spine.
Gwen.
It's a familiar feeling, much like any other Witch you've faced so far... or indeed, any of the cores you find in any puella magi Soul Gem... including your own. You can't say that it's really different from any other Witch you've encountered, other than-
Gwen.
You
know, bone deep, that this particular Witch is
Gwen, and not, say, Aurora or Hildegard. That
is its identity, nothing more and nothing less.
The Witch,
Gwen, seems to be scudding around somewhere under the surface of the boiling oil, and that face is apparently a decoy, or some such. Still...
You reach out with your powers, and rip the Grief comprising the pasty face away to your control. It collapses in on itself, ashen remains mixing into the roiling oil.
A burbling, pained
howl answers you, loud enough to send gobbets of oil bouncing off the surface of the oil and rattle the metallic walls around you. The oil churns beneath you, a mass of oil
surging upwards to form a distinct figure, a hulking juggernaut moulded out of ugly, brown oil. A titantic face leers at you, jagged hole of a mouth gaping wide, and multiple heavy, dripping tentacles formed out of the oil whip around threateningly.
You grin tightly in response, unimpressed.
The juggernaut lunges upwards, grungy brown oil pouring upwards as the tentacles lance at you.
You raise an eyebrow.
The tentacles dissolve, oil losing cohesion and flaking away as you rip away the Grief making up the tentacles.
That burbling howl again.
You wave your warhammer like a conductor's baton, and without any further fanfare, tear away the Grief forming the Witch's head.
The enormous figure of oil quivers for a moment... and collapses, sludgy brown oil pouring back down. The Barrier around you wavers, dissolving into raw Grief that pours ceaselessly into the Grief Seed. You carefully release the Grief you've taken control of after entering this Barrier, bringing the levels of Grief under your control back to what you had before.
The Barrier gives up the ghost completely, and jolts you back into reality, disgorging you in the alley, and torrential rain, beside the old restaurant. The deluge of rain instantly plasters your hair flat against your skull, but you breathe deeply of the pleasantly cool and thankfully
clean air out here.
You take a moment to look around, and grab the Grief Seed from the ground - the rain drowned out the usual noise of the Grief Seed landing, but you home in unerringly using your senses, anyway.
It's still early - that was a particularly unimpressive specimen of a Witch, you think, though probably a little problematic for a puella magi without some kind of area of effect attack, or your
unique capabilities. It's not like Kyouko's spears could stab what were, on reflection, mounds of living salt to death, you reason.
Eh. Perhaps it's just as well you killed that Witch after all?
Regardless, it's only about 3:30PM in the afternoon, you think, about half an hour before Mami and the others end school.
[] Just hang around the school and wait for them
- [] Where to, afterwards?
[] Do something?
- [] What?
[] Write-in
=====
Gwen, the Witch of self hatred. Her nature is rejection. Her Barrier is desolate and empty, inhospitable to outsiders.
