Ayodele Kayode was nervous. Biting her nails, really, and it was definitely pissing off her sort-of, maybe, but not really boyfriend, who was being kind enough as to help her set up a website to utilize her newfound powers through. She just couldn't help her nerves, though; it was a heavy responsibility she'd been handed, as Pretty Fighter Ribbon Velvet! She was definitely not the first magica in the country, not even the first magica in Lagos alone. There were plenty, but she still felt the pressure.
She had a lot riding on this, after all.
"Ayo, could you quit that?" Kachi frowned, looking up from his work with a glare in her direction, "If you're just going to be acting on your terrible nervous habits, you could at least have the common courtesy to act on them somewhere else. Go across the room, where I can't hear you biting your nails."
She pouted, put stopped hanging over Kachi's shoulder and went to the other side of the apartment that the two of them shared, and looked out the window. Lagos was a lively city. She really liked it here; it was a shame that she'd have to leave, but Kachi was banking on it, and she couldn't bring herself to deny him anything. It was almost like they were dating, but without any of the real romantic trademarks that seemed to come along with it.
Not to mention, dating was kind of a weird thing to do in the first place. They were of a similar opinion on that matter, as far as she was aware. Maybe it was because neither of them had grown up in the city, but in suburbs instead, where it wasn't at all uncommon for people they knew to marry before the word dating even dared to cross their lips. It was simply a matter of prudishness, in that case, Ayodele thought. Christianity was common in the southern states of Nigeria, and her family was no exception, nor was Kachi's, and the idea of abstinence until marriage could very easily be pushed to such an extreme of not daring to do so much as kiss before putting a ring on it.
Something that had to be the same all around the world was that cities would be more open than towns, and that was just a given. With the population density, and people coming from all over, and people from all over walking all over the city at all hours, it was impossible to live in a bubble. It was when she and Kachi moved to Lagos for school that Ayodele had realized her discontent. It was the difference between the values her family espoused, and the values she'd met with in school.
It had taken enough effort just to get her family to let her come to Lagos for college, and as soon as she arrived she began hearing so many things which outright conflicted with her upbringing. As she did, she grew apart from her family, but she couldn't really make friends here either. She was caught in between, and her only lifeline was Kachi. Maybe that was why she'd become a magical girl the day he said that he wanted to move to a different country. Cape Verde maybe, he said.
She needed a way to make sure that happened. To make sure she could go with him and make sure she could help. Well, to make sure she could go with him. If Kachi had the go-ahead to look out for number one, he'd find a way to pull it off. Still, Ayodele didn't want him to go alone, but didn't trust in her own abilities to get there with him by her own power. Now, it was different.
As a magical girl, she was above what anyone else thought of her, and if she was able to be as useful as Blade told her she could be, then it would be an easy ride. She would never need to participate in combat, and all of the other magica would look out for her. She could easily travel, and the ad revenue from the website, if every magica actually used it, would be more than enough for her to live comfortably.
It was a purely logical decision, becoming a magical girl.
"How's the website coming, Kachi? Is what Blade wants too difficult?" Ayodele asked as she moved away from the window again, giving her friend a nearly-desperate look.
"It's not too difficult at all. Your cat friend didn't want anything especially complicated, you know. I'm perfectly capable of doing this," Kachi assured her, "In fact, you wanna go ahead and transform and I can start throwing some raw data in?"
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| Pretty Fighter Ribbon Velvet |
"You feel okay? Wanna start giving me some?" Kachi questioned, making sure he wasn't pushing her too far, "Maybe after you speak them aloud, the predictions will stop buzzing around in your head?"
"Good point," Ayodele nodded, "I don't feel good, but I'm okay. Uh," She started giving out information, which Kachi typed in just as quickly as she could speak. His theory was correct; once she said the predictions, they stopped buzzing, at least. She didn't forget them entirely, but the urgency disappeared and stopped hurting her head as much. Instead, it was replaced by a different urgency.
Ayodele clutched her arms around her stomach and gave Kachi a look of pure horror, then put a hand over her mark and transformed back, taking deep breaths and shaking her head, "I got through the monsters. All of them, but it didn't shut down. I saw... That something really terrible, and not a monster, could be happening to a group of magica. Right now. I didn't want to see that, Kachi. I didn't."
"Okay," Kachi nodded, reaching a hand out towards her, "It's okay, and now we know. The furthest you can predict out is eight months before you run out of monsters. It also only seems to be predicting level five and above, which is how we got through all of them so quickly. Blade said that one through four are really common, then five and above get progressively rarer."
"Blade! That's right, I have its number," Ayodele pulled her phone out, frantically pushing her hair back from her face with one hand as she used the other to find the contact she'd made. 'Cat' with a knife emoji after it. That was a pretty good description for an ugly cat named Blade, she thought. She hit call, then shouted into the phone while it was still ringing, realized her mistake, then waited for the distributor to pick up.
-------
As Blade was stepping off the train along with its favorite magical girl and her adult friends, it noticed that the group's missing member rejoined them from the next car over, then started to vibrate in place. It froze, then called out, "Red! I'm getting a call, lemme step aside to take it. I can run fast so I'll catch up with you before the next train leaves!"
"No problem, we were gonna stop and eat something anyway," Sayaka nodded, waving to it as she kept walking. It found a quiet spot, then hacked up its phone and answered.
"Ayodele Kayode! To what do I owe this pleasure? Am I also speaking to Kachi Nigwe?" Blade questioned, but it immediately regretted answering in such a pleasant fashion.
"I worked through all of my monster predictions. I gave Kachi all the raw data, and after I hit eight months out, I stopped getting monster predictions and suddenly started getting predictions about other magica! I couldn't get specifics, but I think that some are in danger! Something really bad is about to happen, if my powers are to be trusted..."
"Your powers are definitely to be trusted. I, however, have no idea what to do about that. If it's not related to a monster, and you didn't get any other details except 'some magica are in danger', then honestly, I'm not in a position to do or solve anything. I'd say, you're an individual, so you have nothing to worry about, okay?" It was starting to panic a little bit, in case this ambiguous danger was another disappearance of unknown nature, "Don't panic," It could at least make the innocent messenger calm down, though.
"Okay," Ayodele answered, taking deep breaths audible through the receiver, "Just... I'm worried. Can you call me again later and tell me if everything turned out fine, as far as you know?"
"I can absolutely do that. Now, I'm missing out on table scraps! Not that I get any nourishment from them, but they sure are tasty. Gotta go, doll. Seeya soon!" With that, Blade hung up, then looked up and across the train station. It waited a moment, then realized something was strange about Sayaka's location signature. Strange being that she was very quickly leaving its range, "...Shit."
It had just teleported all the way from San Francisco, so now it was stranded here while its favorite magical girl, as well as her adult friends, were a group of magica in danger.
-------------------
When Sayaka woke up, she was still in the train station. That was what it seemed to her, anyhow. She knew that she'd woken up; of course she did. She hadn't stayed alive this long only to be unable to tell when she'd been knocked out. When was it? Right, she and the boys had just approached a fast food restaurant. They were at the doorway, not in line yet. That seemed like a conspicuous place to knock somebody out, so maybe she was mistaken. This was a big train station. It was never empty.
Not like single stops. This was a full-on station. There should have at least been a souvenir shop that stayed open all hours of the night, but she didn't see any lights, or any people. That left her with one conclusion; this wasn't the station. It may have looked like the station, but it wasn't. Her first thought, with that in mind, was Lionhardt. This area seemed much too large, however, and she wasn't even sure his powers would work on somebody unconscious. Who else was there?
Sayaka had to admit, she didn't know Goddess's power, but even so, why would she even be on that girl's radar? Perhaps she was after Zhou, or Kanoshi, with all their power built up. That would make sense, because she was a power-hungry despot who built up strength just to turn more of her human followers into magica at her whim. Still, she'd always played somewhat fair in the past, usually targeting magica who didn't make it on the rankings but still had a good amount of power to be gathered.
It didn't make sense for her to change that M.O. now of all times, so Sayaka discarded the possibility. She discarded all possibilities. It wouldn't make sense for her to just keep pondering what this situation could mean, when she should have just been figuring out how to get out of it, and what she could do to accomplish such a thing. She decided it wouldn't be straightforward; she could not escape up the stairs. The stairs hardly even looked real, blurry.
Instead, she decided, she'd have to go through the train system. It switched between underground and aboveground in many places, after all. She'd just follow the tracks until she saw sunlight again. Or moonlight. She didn't know how long she'd been out, after all. With a sigh, Sayaka made her way to the tracks and hopped down, finding a maintenance path that she could walk along. That was convenient enough, and she pushed thoughts of confusion out of the way for now as she just made her way along, one step at a time. It was just one step at a time. Nothing else mattered right now.
It wasn't like she hadn't been in weirder situations. Hell, this situation wasn't entirely unlike her own power of the illusory maze. With that, she found her mind wandering again despite her best efforts. What if this tunnel just went on forever? What if this place was some sort of honest-to-goodness pocket dimension, and it was also where Stripe and all the rest of the best magica had been taken? Had the kidnapper decided they were unsatisfied and decided to take second best?
That was one thought Sayaka couldn't banish from her mind. All the others, she had a good argument against, but the idea that she had joined the ranks of magica who vanished without a trace... She didn't stop walking, but she pulled her phone out to see if she could get some service. Nothing, not a scrap of cell service, let alone 4G or wi-fi. She pouted to be without those things, but the phone still worked, so she decided to distract herself from all the walking with one of the less-internet-dependent mobile games she had downloaded.
Sure, she didn't play anything NEET-y like SIF or DGF, but everyone had at least one time-wasting mobile game they liked. In Sayaka's case, she was fond of match puzzles. Bejeweled knock-offs, one might call them, though she had no idea if that was actually the first iteration of these match puzzles. In any case, with such a huge initial download, she had to have at least a hundred more maps to burn through after the ones she'd already completed. This was a good one which used ads instead of in-app purchases, so she could play right up until her battery burned out.
Though, playing them with no internet connection and thus no way to show the advertisements was sort of taking advantage of the app developers' good faith, but she didn't care right now because it wasn't like she had a choice in the matter. The game served as a good distraction for about an hour of walking before her phone's battery hit 15% and she decided to preserve that remaining bit in case, by some miracle, she came across service after all. She tucked her phone away and looked around, only to freeze where she stood.
She hadn't reached the surface without realizing in her engrossment with the game, no, she hadn't done anything quite like that. She thought it was worse, however. She looked around the subway only to see, that while she was busy ignoring her surroundings, they had shifted quite dramatically. The walls no longer looked anything like walls at all. In fact, they looked like hands. So many hands, all of them reaching, reaching out toward her.
Sayaka could almost swear, now, that she heard some sort of disgusting, visceral sound. It was the kind of scream that could only come of a man being tortured, but it was both distant and omniprescent all at the same time. It surrounded her with all its power, but the sound itself was quiet, too quiet. As if, no matter which direction she looked, she would be too late to save whoever was screaming.
She swallowed her concern and adjusted her backpack before she continued walking, hunched into herself now. She didn't want any of those hands touching her, she knew that much beyond absolutely any shadow of a doubt. They looked like the type of hands which would gladly stick themselves into all manner of places without a second thought. At the same time, they were the hands of businessmen on the subway, the hands of that director of the middle school that Yuuri went to, and the hands of... Him.
The first man she'd killed.
"Kiyoteru Tanaka!"
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| Kiyoteru Tanaka |
She couldn't bear to get any closer, so she stopped. She stopped and made the mistake of turning to look behind her. As soon as she'd turned around, there he was, in front of her. He seemed so tall. He seemed just as much taller than her as he'd been the first time they'd met, when she was six and he was alive, and he referred to himself as 'the better type of lolicon'. She wanted to say she wasn't afraid of him.
She wasn't, but the minute he appeared, she still shut down. It wasn't fear, but still a defense mechanism, she became solid and blank. Vacant, feeling almost like she was only a long-dead ghost possessing her own body, because that was better than being real before him.
"Hello Sayaka-hime," He spoke, tilting his head to the side, "I see you've become a magical girl. Ever the perfect princess for me. Would you like a candy apple?"
"I don't like apples," She answered without inflection, as she would do through the entire conversation. She knew by now that this couldn't be real, but that didn't mean she wasn't feeling the impact of having this man stand before her.
"They're red."
"I don't like apples."
"But they're red."
"But I don't like apples."
"Okay. How about a lollipop?"
"Sure," She took it from him and put it in her mouth.
"I fooled you. The lollipop is apple-flavored."
"You're wrong," She answered, staring him down with her grey eyes glassy, "That's the thing with lollipops. They're always cherry. No matter what the label says or what color they are. Green, or purple, it's all the same. It's just cherry."
"Clever," Kiyoteru chuckled, leaning down to look her in the eyes, "Will you spend another night with me, Sayaka-hime?"
"No, oji-san, I'm a lesbian," She answered, standing her ground. A step in any direction would be her downfall.
"You know, in the real world, you wouldn't be able to deny me if I ordered you to," He stood up straight again, smirking.
"So you admit this isn't the real world. What is it? It's good for you that it's not real, because in the real world, I know you're dead. I killed you."
"You can say that," Kiyoteru shrugged, "But you know now, don't you? There's no way to be sure anymore. The dead can return. You've even teamed up with an aspiring necromancer, so how can you be sure that I'm still dead?"
"I can't be sure, but who's to say you'd ever find me?" Sayaka shot back, though she still didn't betray any emotion in her voice or face.
"Good point, but I should also tell you, I wouldn't waste my powers just to get you back in bed with me, Princess," Kiyoteru cocked an eyebrow, "I could make you do anything, you know. Even kill your friends. Any of them. Good, or very good. Ones you protect, or ones who protect you."
Sayaka finally broke through her dissociative state and glared at him, speaking with conviction, "I would never do something like that, no matter what powers you supposedly have!"
At her harsh words, Kiyoteru seemed to disappear into mist, one piece at a time, floating away. She took a deep breath, then stood up straight and turned back around again, ready to face the narrowing tunnel now that she didn't have the looming dread that Kiyoteru might suddenly appear behind her. The tunnel was gone, though.
Instead, all she saw before her were buildings. Familiar buildings. She was back in Tokyo. Had she still been under the impression that this was reality, or even some distortion of it, then she might have been surprised. As it was, she was piecing together a new theory. Nobody else knew about Kiyoteru, and certainly didn't know enough to create such a pointed dialogue from him. Whatever this situation was, it was something of a nightmare.
Created from her mind, anyway, but it was far too real to be a dream. There was a particular feeling to being awake, to being truly awake. She felt that right now, and so she knew, there was no way that this was a dream. She was moving throughout it, wholly, herself. Thus, she came to one probable conclusion. If she died in this nightmarish setting, she would die in real life. It wasn't an unusual idea; plenty of premises of dying within alternate worlds in which death should be safe existed as fiction, and there was no way to disregard something like that in this day and age.
Sayaka knew now that she was at least making some type of progress, so she continued on into the city which looked like Tokyo. Certain details were perfect, and others were merely loose interpretations. More proof, she decided, that the information to create this world was coming from her own thoughts. She'd been living in the city for a while, and she was good at memorizing layouts, but Tokyo was a big place. Anywhere she knew well, seemed to be just fine. Anywhere she didn't go to often, wasn't.
Sayaka had absolutely no idea where she ought to go next, however. She went to the apartment building where Yuuri and Kanoshi lived, the insides of their apartments bare and lacking when she pushed the doors open. She didn't know what sort of wallpaper or carpeting there might have been inside either of their homes. Kanoshi's had a computer, which when she tried it out lacked internet connection and seemed to have nothing but video games installed, not even default programs.
There was a kotatsu, too, in the middle of the floor, and that was the extent of the possessions that Sayaka knew Kanoshi owned. Yuuri's didn't even have a single piece of furniture, but a few scattered liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and pocket knives. She found that a little absurd. Of course the two of them had furniture, but she supposed it was only the things that she knew for certain they owned, with some small amount of detail.
Depressing.
She stepped out of Yuuri's apartment and closed the door, then hopped out onto the fire escape of the building. She realized she hadn't even thought to test if she could transform here, so she pulled her t-shirt over her head to reveal the marking and willed the transformation to happen. It did, which she was glad for. Now she could travel more freely through the city.
Sayaka's first additional stop was her favorite sweet shop. It was empty of people, but the counters were fully stocked. She looked back and forth, then jumped behind the counter and slid it open, filling one of the store's pastry boxes with strawberry cupcakes, red velvet cookies, and crimson-colored raspberry mochi. Plus, a few other sweets too. It wasn't as if she only liked red food, she just found a lot of them to be her favorites. All sorts of flavors could satisfy her sweet tooth, though. All sorts but apple.
With the box full of sweets that she already started eating as she walked, Sayaka made her way towards her next stop. The empty lot that Kotomi had repurposed into a home seemed like it could have some sort of significance, so she approached it. She was just walking this time, so by the time she reached the lot, she'd finished off her box of sweets and dropped the empty cardboard into a convenient dumpster.
The lot was empty. Well, that much was evident, because it was considered empty at all times given that it had absolutely no property value anymore, but what stood out to Sayaka was that Kotomi wasn't there. She checked the storage units, and none of her stray cats were either. It was yet another meaningless layout. Nothing happened or changed around her. After what happened with the tunnel, she knew there had to be something somewhere which would change.
She couldn't just be stuck here, alone, for all time? What if she'd had the chance to escape by interacting differently with Kiyoteru, and she squandered it? Was this empty, lonely Hell of howling winds and desolate streets her grave? The concern from earlier that this was the result of a disappearance similar to the others came creeping back.
Was Stripe dealing with an equally empty version of the Hollywood Hills, wandering it without anybody to yell at over not being vegan? Well, she kind of thought he'd deserve it, but there were others. Fizzy Pop, and Horace. Sayaka didn't know either of them very well, but she felt that they wouldn't deserve something like this.
She didn't deserve something like this, herself. She really didn't. She wasn't a bad person. She would still be in the top hundred, even without Blade's ability to reduce the damage done by reputation-harming actions. She had to wonder if the same thing had happened to her friends, or if they were back in the real world, wondering where she'd gone? If nobody else would, Blade would worry. It was kind and friendly to her, and she was its favorite. She believed it when it said that.
With this thought, she took a deep breath, then took off in the direction of the nearest subway stop. She found it, and as expected, there was a train waiting there. She stepped up to it and boarded, sitting down. She and Blade often had conversations in subway cars that they got all to themselves thanks to her obvious magica presence, and Blade's obvious distributor existence.
It pulled away from the station at a breakneck pace, faster than it ever seemed to move. Though it didn't appear to be that way, it seemed as if there were no walls on the front of the train by the way that as soon as it began to move, she felt a heavy breeze from that direction throwing her hair to the side. She braced herself by grabbing onto the pole by the door, shifting over to sit as close to her anchor as possible.
"You're wondering what's going on, aren't you?" Blade appeared in the seat across from her. Well, not quite. It looked like Blade at first glance, but if Sayaka focused, was off, somehow. As if it had some small features moved a few millimeters over.
"I am," Sayaka answered, pulling her legs up onto the seat, "I know this place isn't real... But what is it? Where have I ended up?"
"I'm sure that you've got a lot of theories. You're worried that this is a disappearance like the ones which happened to each distributor's highest ranking magica. That's understandable. You don't want to believe that you've been kidnapped again. No matter the nature of this place, you were. You were kidnapped. It happened again. That's because you are a victim. No matter what you do or how many people you kill, you will never shake that fact. You are a victim. You will continue to be victimized for your entire life. Knowing that, why did you decide that you should never die?"
"Blade would never say such a thing to me," Sayaka clenched her fists, refusing to look at this poor recreation of the creature she considered one of her closest friends.
"It's funny that the place which you consider home is Tokyo," It chuckled, "But I guess that's because you can't go back to Kobe. And you think you could go back to Nagasaki, but nothing waits for you there. Do you think that going there will excuse you from someday telling those friends of yours why you really became a magical girl? That they'll figure it out just by going to the place where you once came close to death, to escape?"
Sayaka shifted in her seat, leaning on her hand, "They're not such good friends that they ever need to know."
"Oh really? Is that so?" Blade questioned, its head turning a good ninety degrees in one moment. The movement wasn't there at all; it just changed to that appearance. Sayaka had been trying to avoid looking at it, but she still saw this, and grimaced, "If they're not such good friends, then which one of them will you watch die, I wonder?"
"W-What!?" Sayaka questioned, only to find her head involuntarily turned to look to the left, where the breeze was coming from. Instead of the wall, now, it seemed to be some sort of screen. She went to look away, but found that she was frozen in place and couldn't move at all.
"If you don't care, as much as you claim you don't care..." Kanoshi appeared on the screen, aiming these words at her as he stood there. She squinted, only to see that there was a bullet hole straight through his eye. The eye that held his mark, of course, "Then what do you care?"
"Yeah, Yamaguchi-chan," The image shifted to Yuuri now, on his knees and clutching a stump of a right shoulder, "If you're so much more competent than all of us, doesn't that mean that before anything could kill you, you'd have to see us all die first...?"
It changed once more, to Kotomi, but much older than she was, "And of course you'll outlive a human like me, too. Someday, you will be all alone. Everyone will abandon you, just like the oyabun did."
Sayaka squeezed her eyes shut and shouted, "Kotomi doesn't know about that! The least you could do is make this shit make sense!"
"But we're just getting started, Sayaka," The thing which tried to resemble Blade spoke, "You've got a lot to unpack, Princess."
And behind her, the next train car down, suddenly exploded, bringing the train to a halt. Her hair settled again, and she turned to see what had just happened.
"Follow me," A man who looked, but didn't sound at all like Kiyoteru Tanaka spoke.
She listened.
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