Homura's attention snaps up, glaring at Sayaka, to which the bluenette only responds with a sunny grin rivalling one of yours.
"Thought that might get your attention," she says. "Yeah, so... listen. I'm pretty sure I'm missing more than half the story here, but uh... just talking about those. I mean, I guess Sabrina kind of said it already, but putting your life in someone else's hands is a pretty big gesture. It feels like..." Sayaka grimaces. "It feels like Oriko's saying she can trust you. Or maybe that she trusts Sabrina, since she's here and stuck into everything? I dunno where I was going with this, ignore me."
Homura stares at Sayaka for a long, long moment.
"... what?" Sayaka raises an eyebrow, obviously trying not to fidget. "Something I said?"
This... this bothers me. I can't explain why but I get a whole "This isn't right" vibe from this quick exchange. The feeling something is deeply wrong and I just can't quite pick it out. I mean, I can descend into paranoia with the best of them but...
The first thing that comes to mind is that the world tilted off axis slightly the day Sabrina made the barrier. When I reread the thread recently, it struck me that either directly or indirectly, outside of Walpurgisnacht's slow approach, most if not all of what's happened since started that day. My memory for detailed timelines isn't fantastic, I'm sure I've got some of it wrong, but from the moment we tried the barrier, things got screwy. Unfortunately we've got no way of separating out the influence of the first vs the second barrier attempt on the timeline, beyond the minor breakdown Mami had after the first one that directly lead to our attempt at the second one.
After that second one though it became much easier to see we just gave everything good in the world a meaty thwack. And that's after Mami was done freaking out because we scared her half to death again. Then we notice the feather. Immediately after that our evening plans go out the window as Sayaka suddenly teleports across town and Oriko calls us to give us the heads up. So we go save smurfette but the damage is done and she contracts that night. Meanwhile Megane Ono who we have to blow off twice over this series of events goes from pleasant to rude to impossible (with us conveniently making both barriers in between interactions with her) so in true Sabrina style we break into her house and aggressively save her life, pissing her off forever in the process. Next morning we find out Sayaka's become a wizard and go to grill Oriko about it only to find that her powers are failing and she is in agony. Finally, I can't prove this one, but I believe that over this timeframe is when Kuroki Matsuko was "vanished", most likely by the same entity that's responsible for Sayaka doing the time warp, no sign of her or her witch since.
Something about this whole, weird, waffly, utterly millenial quote just brought it back to me that Sayaka, in a lot of ways hasn't been the same since. And not just in the "nearly died, then made an awesome wish to help her friends" sort of way. A lot of the discussion about her potentially being Mikiel started thereafter as well. And I've forgotten where I'm going with this. Maybe the thread's bleeding into Sayaka's brain as well these days.
Reminds me, something keeps bothering me about the fact Sayaka wished for us as well. We made it through the logic checkpoint that Kirika wished for Oriko and that was important, and I feel like the extension that Sayaka in a much looser sense wished for a few people... maybe that's it. She wished to be useful to her friends. Us, Mami, Homura, Hitomi, Kwyjibo and... Madoka. She indirectly wished to be useful to Madoka. Don't know if there's anything to that, but it lands like there is in my brain.
