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[firestia]

Little pony princesses 💗

[dyingrabbit]

Negated Universe Misadventures - Chapter Two

(Round two I s’pose. This might actually still be the best chapter. Oh well. Sorry for the long post again. Madoka Magica SPOILERS.)

Humor/Dark

Subjective narrator (Homura Akemi)

Word count: 4209

“Fuck” count: 28

Proof of Concept: Part One (Attempt #27)

As far as I was concerned, there were no more than two ultimate goals that needed to be fulfilled to constitute a successful run.

Number one, Madoka needed to survive.

Number two, Madoka could not be allowed to contract with Kyubey.

What I continually found, however, was that pursuing these goals at the expense of everything else led to an insurmountable catch-22 when it came to defeating Walpurgisnacht. Simply put, without the aid of the other girls, it became impossible to defeat the mega-witch unless Madoka transformed. If she didn't, she died, or I gave up and reset. If she did, she one-hit Walpurgisnacht and then succumbed to despair, or I mercy killed her. Failure all the way around.

So although my ground rules remained constant, it became necessary to consider the implications of my fundamentals. Id est, I needed to also ensure the safety and cooperation of the other three magical girls.

The game was thus that I needed to assist Mami in eliminating Charlotte without getting on her bad side, either prevent Sayaka from contracting in the first place or stop her from free falling into despair if she does, and lastly to rein in Kyouko so that she doesn't throw a wrench into the group's synergy. All this was much easier said than done, but it looked really neat as a bullet pointed list in my notebook.

Alright, I'll admit it. The notebook had so far served very little utility beyond being a really cute prop. But God damn it, I was having a fucking blast organizing this thing.

It was a leather bound journal with a little buckle on it. When I first saw it on display at a stationary store I was visiting for no particular reason, and I stress that it was for no fucking particular reason, I realized it was probably incredibly vital in ensuring Madoka's survival.

It would be pure conjecture, of course, to assert that it was while I stood there in the stationary store staring at the journal for several minutes that I concocted the entire plan for performing a control run and taking detailed notes in THAT journal. It would be pure conjecture, yes, and thus an invalid basis for making any conclusions about my reasoning process. This was due in large part to a true god-out-of-the-machine-tier lifesaver in that the argument "No, I totally planned that out earlier. The notebook was auxiliary, not instrumental, to the plan's inception" was completely and utterly unfalsifiable.

Anyway, I hadn't decided yet if I was going to go with a perfectly neat and organized look, such that someone could read it and know exactly what I was talking about, or if I should go with a cluttered mad scientist's sprawl of random figures and arcane passages which held varying levels of important information, such that anyone who picked it up would think I was insane but brilliant. Undeniably brilliant.

So far it looked pretty sparse because the last run ended, quite unfortunately, a bit prematurely. But that would change soon, I was sure.

This next run would be more of a proof of concept run in that I would focus on gauging the feasibility of performing the actions specified in my to do list.

Item number one was making sure Mami didn't go and get herself killed this time in Charlotte's lair. This required a bit of preliminary PR shit so that Mami and the gang trusted me enough to bring me along.

The most success I've had with that in the past came when I was a total shit-tier magical girl with glasses and a golf club. The better part of their trust was probably transmuted from an abject sense of pity they felt for me, as I could hardly beat up a defenseless metal drum much less anything more sentient than, say, a defenseless metal drum.

There wasn't anything wrong with sticking to what works, so I decided to play the powerless moe fountain with a heart condition to get on Mami's good side. This unfortunately meant completely forfeiting my cool factor. It meant I was sticking with the glasses, it meant I had to act all shy and demure about everything, and it meant I had to bring back the God damned twin tail braids. The good news was that I was merely testing a limiting case to prove that saving Mami was even feasible. In the future I'd probably be able to fine tune this so that I wouldn't have to hate myself in order to clear this stage, but for now we were just looking for guarantees.

When I introduced myself in class I purposefully averted my eyes from all the other students and clutched my bag as though it were a life raft. As an additional touch, I briefly looked up and locked eyes with Madoka for a fraction of a second before quickly looking back at the ground.

Oh, fuck yeah. I went there.

You see, it seemed like an accident, but now Madoka is unwittingly invested because she feels guilty for staring at me. I almost felt sorry for pulling out such decrepit stops in this instance because she clearly stood no fucking chance against my masterful psychological attacks.

When break came, I made a big show out of feeling light headed and informed Saotome-sensei. She directed Madoka, the nurse's assistant, to guide me to the nurse's office. So far this was playing out much like the original timeline. It was almost nostalgic.

Madoka was fairly timid around people she'd just met and I was no exception. However, since I'd worked so hard to present myself as socially extinct, she seemed to place me on a lower rung than herself and attempted to get me to open up.

She wasn't generally an excellent active listener, though she clearly tried very hard. To be blunt, I'm not sure she was capable of grasping the concept of a leading question.

"So you just transferred, huh?" She redundantly mused as we walked down the hallway.

"Um, yes." I said nervously, really putting on the gas, "I-I've been the hospital for a long time, you see..."

A critically malfunctioning abacus could have told you what the next topic of conversation ought to have been, but Madoka just said, "Oh." We spent most of the walk in silence.

Madoka wasn't exactly opening up a window for conversation but, since it was necessary to provide her with some sort of self-esteem boost here, I eventually broke down and just inserted a "I think you're a really strong person" without any context.

Without my intervening, Madoka and Sayaka eventually met up with Mami and excitedly began their journeys as magical girls in training. When they eventually tracked Gertrud down, I just so happened to show up at the exact same time. Of course I'd had no idea Mami was also a magical girl. More importantly, I was more than happy to share in the glory of battle with the three of them. All with an innocent unassuming smile to top it off. Sayaka seemed to be a bit suspicious about the remarkable coincidence, as she would be, but the other two were fucking putty in my hands.

Game, set, match.

I let Mami handle Gertrud herself. I mean, I certainly pretended to help out, but for the most part I kept my bad ass arsenal on the down low. No reason to draw any undue attention to myself just yet. Plus, this particular fight is about as cool as Mami ever gets to look, so it would be a bit cruel to take this away from her just because.

And she looked great. Really, she did. She was in top form. The little move where she casually starts sipping her tea after demolishing the witch was certainly quite cheeky, but I was mostly just jealous that I couldn't use that now without catching some major shit.

In any event, I was totally part of the gang now. Public relations had been a resounding success. Now it was time to keep miss Tomoe from losing her head up her ass.

I hadn't given much thought to it yet, but action item number two was going to be pretty fucking difficult. Taking this line with Mami, in promoting a positive image of magical girls in general, made it all but certain that at least Sayaka would want to make a contract with Kyubey.

In some ways, Mami dying made it a lot easier to keep the other two from contracting. In the same way, for instance, making a show of accidentally shooting someone in the head made a compelling argument for safe gun handling practices. But it also meant I was down a man for no other reason than to delay what had consistently proved to be an inevitability. That being Madoka and Sayaka contracting.

I'd need to put some serious effort into discouraging the idea without coming across as a total hypocritical bitch. It would be a hard fucking line to walk but I had a few tricks up my sleeve. Again, I was getting ahead of myself.

I wasn't nearly close enough to Sayaka to get in on her little visits to that Kyousuke kid, so in order to set myself up to help fight Charlotte I needed to come up with some bullshit reason to go visit Mami prior to the discovery of the grief seed. I didn't regard this task with very high importance so it felt like I wasted a shit ton of time on it.

In hindsight, I clearly didn't spend nearly fucking long enough preparing for this visit. We'd had a little study bash the other night, so I decided to pretend I'd left my notes at her apartment by accident. For some reason this struck me as the quintessential foot-in-the-door from which myriad conversations could bloom. Not that it couldn't have been. I just sort of expected Mami would be the one to engage first.

When I arrived at her apartment, she showed me inside. Since I'd called ahead she already had some refreshments laid out.

Strike one for me.

I had been planning on taking her up on an obligatory offer of tea so that she'd be out of the room for a brief moment while I pretended to find my notebook underneath a cushion. It didn't matter, as it turned out. She seemed to be quite content just staring out the window for no apparent reason.

Seizing the opportunity, I made some rustling movements as though I were looking around and shit and then happily exclaimed,

"Oh, here it is!"

Mami looked over at me and smiled mildly.

"Where was it?" She asked.

"It was under the cushion I used the other night." I lied in response.

"That's funny, I looked around after you called me and I could've sworn I checked under there." She replied, still smiling.

I politely chuckled to disguise myself choking on an abstract sense of fear.

"Well, I found it and that's all that matters." I said with a grin.

Then silence. Horrifying, pitch dark silence.

Mami smiled demurely at me as I sat at her table holding my notes.

Strike two.

Dear sweet fucking Christ she seemed to think this visit was over. This wouldn't do at all. Madoka still needed to burst in and tell us about the grief seed at the hospital and Mami was about to kick me out before the fun even started. What happened to the holy grail of conversation starters that was the forgotten homework visit? Fucking hell, why the fuck didn't I think of anything to say to stall?

I'd severely underestimated Mami. I'd wholeheartedly believed that she was so cripplingly lonely that she'd be desperate to strike up a conversation with just about anyone given the opportunity. Yet here she was, demonstrating that she'd much rather stare out her fucking window and be left the fuck alone. I had to say something, anything to make my staying here seem remotely sensible.

"S-So, uh, Tomoe-san, what brand of shampoo do you-" I was interrupted by an obscenely asinine ringtone.

Incidentally it was Madoka delivering important information involving an impending witch instantiation.

I need to stop right here because I don't fucking get it.

I swear to God, every single loop before the last one had the girls foregoing their cell phones at this critical juncture. For some illusively intangible reason they had decided, twice in a row now, that cell phones were rather important in this day and age and that keeping them on your person was a well-established folkway. Having reached this conclusion they apparently both went ahead and grabbed them before heading out the door today.

Not that I was upset per se that the ubiquity of modern technology had suddenly clicked for them; in fact, thank fuck for cell phones because without them I would've been sentenced to several more minutes of spamming generally conversational phrases at Mami and likely failing miserably at it.

No, it just seemed so randomly precise that two vastly differing approaches somehow yielded the same microscopic difference in the timeline that simply hadn't existed before. I certainly wasn't consciously shooting for this result. Furthermore, this run was in large part the same as the first one with a few positioning differences.

Hell, If I'd made it a priority to get these muchachas to bring their phones with them I'd have no fucking idea where to start. It was as though some sentient force out there was tweaking little things like this for the express purpose of annoying the utter living shit out of me.

For the record, it was fucking working.

We dropped everything to go help out with the situation at the hospital, of course. We made it just in time to witness the creation of a witch's labyrinth. In a very organized fashion we geared up, looked both ways, and then entered.

Mami was well and truly built for demolishing trash mobs. I mean that in the most heartfelt way possible. At the outset I had made the decision to let her handle things before we got to Charlotte's main chamber and, to be honest, that left me feeling a little guilty. As it turned out, however, it would have been difficult for me to get a word in edgewise as Mami swept the floor with these bastards before I could think to do anything.

Her single shot muskets weren't terribly impressive by themselves, but her bread and butter was in sheer number of projectiles. She had the ability to summon seemingly endless hordes of flintlock rifles out of her beret and had an effective fire rate that handily competed with a semi-automatic carbine. She would also pirouette, turning her attack into a lethal long range AOE attack. Then she would go and hit every fucking shot.

I rarely needed to rely on flick accuracy because I could just stop time and take decades lining up a shot. So it's not really that I was jealous, it was more 'how dare she be such a show off when there are fucking kids starving in Africa'.

Quite refreshingly, Mami didn't have her total mental breakdown about being so lonely as a magical girl this time. I might have pinned it on the fact that I was present, and also a magical girl, so she had less reason to be upset this time, but that would've made me a bit conceited. She could just have easily remembered to eat breakfast this morning or seen a homeless puppy and decided to adopt it. I pinned it on me anyway because fuck puppies and breakfast.

The practical upshot was that nobody needed to feel awkward about watching Mami cry going into the final battle. The downside was that Madoka no longer had a fallback wish for a really big cake if she couldn't think of anything else. The cost-benefit ratio was pretty difficult to compute given such abstract terms and, frankly, wasn't even remotely important. So I did everyone a favor and assumed that it tended to 1 when recording it in my notes, albeit with a healthy asterisk next to it.

Again, this was a proof of concept run. So once we breached the main chamber I gave Mami a solid five seconds of fun before freezing time to set my own shit up.

Time constraints notwithstanding, she'd done a fucking number on the place already.

Charlotte had been blasted into the air and the remains of several of her servants were strewn about her like the ink blots of a Rorschach test. I don't know what Mami made of it, but to me it looked a hell of a lot like two giraffes spooning. Except the giraffes were on fire and their guts had exploded out of their bodies and they were being choked to death by their own guts.

Freud and Jung could laugh all they wanted. They could laugh until Ragnarok itself were upon us and continue to laugh as they fought and died gloriously for the promise of a world reborn, but it would not change the undeniable fact that I was looking at two deathlessly kinky, self-asphyxiating, long necked motherfuckers set ablaze in a fire of eternal damnation.

There were a couple others that looked sort of like ice cream cones but I could see those being credited to an active imagination.

This was gonna take a couple time stops.

First I needed to inflict enough damage to bait her into her final form, then stop time again to set up my killing salvo. Mami's generally able to do this with an initial barrage of musket fire followed by a wallop from her big fucking cannon. So I decided to try emulating her typical firing solution.

I didn't have any sixteenth century antiques on hand, but I did have my trusty Type 89 which, for fuck's sake, better be at least comparable in terms of lethality. If not, I had plenty of cartridges so that oughta fudge it in my favor anyway.

I liberally applied bullets in no particular pattern other than generally pointed at Charlotte's flailing doll body. After I achieved a satisfactory coating, I swapped my rifle for an AT-4. Here's where I needed to do a bit of guesswork.

I certainly didn't know how big of a punch Mami's cannon packed. It was doubtful that she even knew within any reasonable bounds. So even if I had the time, it didn't seem as though it would be profitable to go ask her how powerful her finishing move was in units of anti-tank rockets.

I'm sure I could have jury rigged some sort of bullshit Fermi equation for this, if I'd felt like spending that long, but instead I just opted to launch projectiles until the resultant jet streams appealed to my uninformed standards of dynamic symmetry. There was about six or seven in the air by the time I was done. Now it was time to stand back and let her rip.

For a brief moment, Mami still looked pretty happy with herself as she grabbed another musket and began lining up her next shot. Her glib expression turned to one of genuine confusion as her field of vision was filled by a maelstrom of bullets with several explosions at its center.

Charlotte's body was flung against the far wall, riddled with holes and singed in numerous places. Not to be outdone, though, she immediately sprang back out, revealing her true snake-like form. I waited for her to zero in on me, then stood firm as she opened her gaping mouth to envelop my petite frame.

Time stop number two.

I now had a perfect shot at the witch's internals. I just needed to dump a bunch of explosives into her stomach and trigger them to go all at once. I leapt into Charlotte's maw and performed a cursory inspection of the structural integrity of her body. I noted any inflamed or otherwise shrapnel ridden tissue, load bearing vertebrae, and internal lesions. These served as excellent locations to place C-4 charges.

For good measure, I also littered the esophagus with some M26 frags and some old pipe bombs I found lying around in my shield.

Shit.

My cake was still in here. I'd totally forgotten about it. It'd been at least a couple weeks since I bought it now. No way in hell was this thing still edible.

Fuck it. Charlotte could have it.

I unceremoniously hurled the box, discus style, as far back into her throat as I could manage before hopping out. After getting to a safe distance, I pulled out my remote detonator and prepared for the fireworks.

To outside observers, namely Mami, Sayaka, and Madoka, the whole process occurred over roughly 5 seconds. It ended with Charlotte ripping apart at the seams as spectacular orange flames erupted from every orifice, most of which were brand new.

At first you could hear the individual charges blasting one at a time but, as the initial explosions triggered the additional ordinances I'd left lying around, it became more of a cacophony of ear splitting cracks not unlike an altogether unhealthy number of popcorn bags being microwaved at once. It was pretty spectacular.

Sure, it was wholly unnecessary to waste that many explosives on a single target, but this was no world for half measures. Besides, some of that stuff was getting old. It's not terribly ideal to be reliant on old equipment, especially the kind that can deconstruct your body if handled improperly.

Nothing of real note was left of Charlotte. In fact I couldn't really be sure that the things I was tentatively ID'ing as her remains actually used to belong to her.

Grief seeds usually at least make an effort to crop up in areas of dense witch matter after a kill. Not that it's important or anything. To me it adds a bit of welcome reactivity in how the seeds are presented which is, nonetheless, entirely aesthetic in nature. That being said, this grief seed didn't seem to want to touch this one with a ten foot pole and I didn't blame it.

It sort of just appeared on the ground well off to the side which everyone knew was total bullshit. But frankly there wasn't anything left that one could point to as quintessentially Charlotte.

Complete disintegration. I'd never done that to her before.

I'd make a really utilitarian note about it like it wasn't that big a deal. My contemporaries would ogle and scratch their heads while they sat awestruck at how unbelievably chill my report was.

There was something of an awkward silence as the room dissolved around us and we returned to the hospital.

"Akemi-s-san?" Madoka nervously uttered. "Did... you do that?"

Mami was in the same position she'd been in since the second time stop, still clutching her musket and aiming at an empty sky. She slowly lowered her weapon and glanced at me with inadequately veiled concern in her eyes.

This was all fair, I suppose. I hadn't made it priority number one to display the breadth of my firepower before this particular outing, so their confusion was understandable.

"Hehe, w-what do you mean, Kaname-san? Which part?" I replied as though trying to appear modest.

I wasn't sure whether it made any sense to act green anymore as, firstly, I already had an in with these folks and, secondly, the cat might kind of be out of the bag at this point.

I'd never presented myself as dumb to these people but, given the whole moe vibe I'd been projecting, that may have been the default assumption. Foregoing the idea that I was unfathomably stupid, my inquiry, on its face, made absolutely no fucking sense. And that was reflected quiet amicably in Sayaka's playful yet stern rejoinder.

"Which fucking part do you think?" She said, providing much needed clarification.

I sighed. I guess I wasn't quite done with the PR shit after all.

I suppose causing things to inexplicably disaggregate and then expecting everyone to be cool with it was pushing the bounds of friendship, or acquaintanceship as it were, slightly beyond what was reasonable.

Everyone stared at me expectantly as I slowly wiped the nervous smile off my face. Oh well. They say hindsight's 20-20.

Fuckin' A.

TO BE CONTINUED