by N X Hunter
"What is up with her? She was in such a rush earlier, and you were there - was she who you were talking to? And now she looks like she's been dragged through something, and... How long was she gone? How long was I out? Did I faint?"
"OK so we're starting from now and working backwards, then? Fair enough. Well, Rayna was in a rush because she had to go out and fight the storm, and she was already kinda pissed because you hadn't shown up yet and a storm was coming. See, that bit was just bad timing, but it really fucked things up for us because we were supposed to make sure someone was watching you the next time a storm hit, what with there being a strong chance that this would happen now. So, I was following you, and once I caught up to you she left, and I waited for her outside with Courtney, because at that point we knew Ivy would be able to spot you."
"I don't think this approach to explaining is, shall we say, helping in any fucking way. Sorry Soren..."
He gave an apologetic smile, as if to say he was doing his best. He paused, as if trying to think of a better way to say it all, and after a deep breath, began again, slowing down a little this time.
"OK... Well, let's go with the broad strokes then. Rayna is a mahou shoujo, which means when there's a storm, she fights it, in a team with another girl named Courtney. Who's a stripper, but... that's probably not an important point... So, and this is probably the bit I should have lead with... You're one too."
"I'm a what now?"
"You're the new member of her team. This will probably explain quite a lot of weird stuff for you, actually, so, hey, it's pretty cool being the guy to tell you."
"It's not explaining anything at all, yet, Soren. Fighting storms? Like, what does that even mean? And why would I want to do that, I'm the last person suited to it - I have a literal phobia of storms."
"Ah, but this is one of the things I now get to explain, that will shed light on things you've probably wondered about your whole life - man, this must be so weird for you!" he said, almost comically, "OK, so, you have a phobia of storms. What does that date back to?"
"What is this now, therapy?" Kitsuna asked.
Soren was just looking at her encouragingly, waiting for her to go on. He nodded.
Kitsuna sighed.
"It was because of my mom, I guess. I mean, I don't know, but they do say you can learn to be scared of things your parents are scared of because of how they act when you're very young, so, since my mom was also afraid of storms, I suppose that's why I am. Anyway, they make me feel really on edge, and she, well, she just got that, so I am sure she felt the same."
"Felt?"
"Yeah, she died when I was 14. She got sick."
"And your dad? Any aunts, grandmothers, other blood related women?"
"Now this sounds like a medical check up... And, no, I never knew my dad, and my mom didn't keep us in touch with the rest of her family - I think they live in Asia or something. It wasn't important - there was just us, and her friends. When she first got sick, I was only 10, and she made arrangements that I'd go and live with her friend Megan after she died. But she held on til I was 14, somehow, even though the doctors didn't think she would last six months, and then, well, I didn't want to be a burden to Meg and there was mom's life insurance, so, I enrolled in a boarding school and lived there. I was fine. You know, apart from being completely devastated that my mom was gone. But what do blood related women have to do with storms?"
"All the mahou shoujo are connected by a bloodline that goes back to this ancient Japanese empress. There were these young girls who were her bodyguard, around the time storms stopped being... well, just weather. They were sorceresses, basically. Mahou shoujo is Japanese for 'magical girls', so, yeah, they were magical girls who were the first to fight the storms. As the things started coming through from the Big Emptiness, they somehow were given the power to fight them, I guess it's the nature of the Earth to like, adapt and find a way to deal with threats, and who can say why nature decided that girls with crazy powers were the solution, but that's what happened. So, yeah, the descendants of the mahou shoujo have been keeping the storms under control ever since."
"Wait, so... I'm part of that bloodline, and so was my mom, and so is Rayna? But she's your twin, so, that means you are too? Are we related?"
The man smirked.
"The original mahou shoujo weren't related to each other, so there are quite a few different bloodlines, but in any case, we're talking about ancient history. There are thousands of mahou shoujo in the world now. So, we could be a bit related, but hey, no more so than people with the same last name might have a shared ancestor somewhere hundreds of years ago. This isn't some kind of chosen one deal - the storms got stronger over time, not just attacking that one empress lady's lands but everywhere where there were people. For some reason, maybe because the original mahou shoujo were all female, only the women of the bloodlines are affected. So, there are girls like you and Rayna everywhere. There need to be."
Kitsuna felt a little embarrassed for not figuring that out. If she was completely honest, she just wanted to be sure that there was nothing potentially gross about the fact she thought Soren was sexy as all hell.
"So, OK, suppose what you're saying is true..."
"Which it is, as much like tripped out bullshit as it sounds,"
"Well, if my mom was one of these shoujo thingies then, why didn't she ever say anything? And how did I end up here with exactly the right people to explain it to me... Unless...."
"You're getting it, right? I'm not fucking this up too badly?"
"Unless that's why Calibre Academy was the only school that accepted me, and I got placed in this apartment with Rayna. The school has something to do with it."
"Bingo. There, well, there's a complicated relationship between who knows about mahou shoujo and who doesn't. Most people don't, obviously, or this wouldn't be in any way surprising to you, but there are enough of them that there is a kind of infrastructure in place for kinda managing and supporting the whole thing. Nobody else can fight the storms, but a council of mahou shoujo decided a long time ago that the girls shouldn't be burdened with anything more than the fighting, and they put some rules in place, enforced with some kind of oath magic that we, as yet, haven't been able to really replicate. This was hundreds of years ago. Those women decreed that mahou shoujo should be allowed to have families, and not have to live in total secrecy, and that the people who love them should be able to help them in whatever other ways they can - tech, combat training, all that kind of stuff that can be done outside of the storms. So people like me, and the teachers at schools like Calibre Academy, we're trusted with the secret because we love someone who is a mahou shoujo. We are an even bigger community than the girls themselves. Keeping an eye on girls who haven't transformed yet, and influencing things so that they end up where they need to be to be integrated into everything, that's one of the many duties of our network."
"My high school... It was the only one I applied to that would accept my mom's life insurance. Was that one of your schools too?"
"No doubt. There have to be people watching girls like you with the bloodline from a pretty young age, although, if you’d transformed younger you’d have simply started going to a ‘special program of education’ at Calibre Academy on the side, the middle schools and high schools really are normal schools, just with some staff that we place. Girls can transform basically any time after they hit puberty, and this is what happens at first - a blackout. It's harmless when the people around you know what it is, but, well, let me ask you this - have you ever been alone when a storm hit, since you were, say, 12 or so?"
"No, I haven't... So, someone was always watching over me in case, this?" Kitsuna knew immediately that what he was saying was true there - she'd even wondered, because of her phobia, how she'd feel in a storm were there no people around.
"They wouldn't have had people who knew the secret trying to watch you at all times, that would be impractical, and there's the failsafe of the bead on your
Talizman, too - it'll send an alert if you lose consciousness when a storm comes. But, well, this is why you have your phobia. All mahou shoujo have it. From a very young age, before they can even be aware of it, mahou shoujo are conditioned, by a harmless form of hypnosis, to act in a certain way when a storm comes - to wake up if they are sleeping, to seek out other people, and cover. Run into a mall or be just, anywhere where someone can see them."
"I was hypnotized to feel that horrible way intentionally? But, surely if a teenage girl just faints in a random mall people aren't going to know it's because she has... whatever this is. Don't they just end up being sent to the hospital and having loads of unnecessary tests and... oh."
Kitsuna's mouth had worked just a little faster than her brain.
"Yeah, not everybody at the hospitals knows, but there are certain protocols where emergencies involving unconscious girls are swiftly cross checked against our database of untransformed mahou shoujo, and so things get handled."
"But... my mom. She knew. And she was one too? And we were both hypnotized and given these weird phobias? Why didn't she prepare me?"
"It's part of the whole system. I don't make the rules up. For better or worse, it's in the rules that a mahou shoujo who becomes pregnant is retired from her duties. She'll still be aware when the Big Emptiness attacks, unlike everyone else, but she is given a blocking crystal that prevents her from being taken into the storm domain. Her role at that point is ensuring the bloodline continues, so, she'll be replaced and she'll raise her kids. Her kids - the girls at least - will be conditioned, and they do something to boys like me, too, to make us extra protective over our sisters, maybe a bit more fond of them than normal brothers are... so once your sister is brought into that world, you don't even question that you're going to follow her and help her. But the mothers don't tell their children. There's some sort of magic the old mahou shoujo who created all these rules used, that prevents them from doing that. The intention was that every mahou shoujo gets a pleasant, normal childhood before she has to deal with all of this. But, yeah, quite a lot of the girls I know, they'd rather have been forewarned."
Kitsuna felt numb. Her poor mother. Had she tried to hang on to life until whenever this happened to Kitsuna, so she could finally talk to her about this secret, this thing they shared but had never been able to discuss?
"I'm sorry," Soren said, seeing her inquisitiveness stall. She'd been doing so well, trying to process her situation, and keep an open mind, but, now she was thinking about her mom, their relationship, what it could have been if it weren't for cancer.
"What are you sorry for? It sounds like this is a shitty situation for everyone involved."
"Well, it just seemed like an 'I'm sorry' kind of moment..."
"You haven't told me what the things these mahou shoujo are supposed to be fighting are, yet…" she replied, grimly.
Chapter 3
There came a point when Kitsuna had to ask him to stop.
It was overload, and she was weak as it was. Her hands were trembling and she could feel the clammy sweat on her face and palms.
"Please, Soren... I need to process this a bit. I feel... not good. Monsters from another dimension... I just... It's too weird."
Soren squeezed her shoulder, and she wished she didn't feel quite so physically gross - under other circumstances his strong hand would have felt most appealing on her body, but, this wasn't the moment for such imaginings.
"I get it. Besides, I'm not the best person to explain what it's like inside the storm, since I have never been there."
In truth, he hadn't been the best at explaining anything, but she was grateful that he'd tried. Even the best lecturer in the world probably couldn't have made any of this easy to digest.
"I feel exhausted. You know what, do you think once I've made my bed, Rayna would mind if I borrow her cat for tonight? Might be helpful with the stress to have her purring away next to me."
Soren looked like he was about to start explaining something else, but then he seemed to think better of it.
He looked at his watch.
"Yeah, it's night now - sorry, I guess the windows in this room aren't properly set up yet. But, yeah, the cat, she should be fine to pet now."
It was an odd thing to say but she scarcely registered it. She moved to get up again, to fetch her bag and put sheets on the bed.
"Nononono, you stay right there, I'll take care of it."
She nodded in exhausted gratitude. Within a few minutes, he'd gently helped her up onto her unsteady legs, made the bed about as well as one might expect a 22 year old man to do it, and adjusted the window to show a dark, starry sky.
"Give me a shout when you've gotten changed and I'll bring you a cat, OK?"
She stood in front of the panel by the sink and brushed her teeth, not wanting to switch it to mirror screen mode, because she didn't even want to know how bad she had looked while she'd been talking to him.
***
She woke from a heavy sleep, full of fragmented dreams of her mother, as the windows piped in a colorful sunrise. Her mouth felt horrible, but otherwise, the feeling of sickness had passed. Now there was just a cloying feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach, spiking straight into her mind and depriving her of any moment of easy forgetfulness as she woke up. Ivy the cat was asleep beside her face on the pillow, breathing peacefully.
She was still here, and it was all real.
She stretched and listened. Rayna was in the living room, she could tell, because she was making strange 'kya!' type sounds, as if she was karate chopping things.
I guess my roommate, team mate, whatever the fuck she is... Soren's sister... even wakes up weird. I suppose I've got to go talk to her though. There's still so much I need to ask, primary of which is, how the fuck do I get out of this?
The idea had been forming in her mind even before Soren had explained about the Big Emptiness - the strange other dimension with its trippy monsters (things he couldn't describe, because he'd never seen them and nobody had ever been able to sufficiently describe them to him). She hadn't wanted to ask him outright then, because she didn't want him to think she was a coward, but she was sure that those mahou shoujo women who'd made the rules, the ones who had been so keen that girls like her were allowed trouble free childhoods, and were looked after by a support network, and could be mothers, must have put something in place where she could just say no. They cared about making the world better for people like themselves, so they must have cared about the free will of girls like her, too. She hadn't 'transformed', yet, whatever that actually entailed. Soren had said that the blackout was just the first sign, and wasn't the transformation itself. There must still be time for her to make the choice to walk away. Maybe she'd have to sign a load of documents to say she'd never reveal what she knew. Maybe she'd have to be recruited into whatever network it was Soren worked for now she knew the secret. That wouldn't be so bad. Maybe she'd have to have her memory erased or something - even that wouldn't be as bad as having to take on a life of strange, dangerous combat she was in no way trained for, against some kind of insane Eldritch abominations. She'd be happier not knowing any of it existed.
Rayna isn't going to like it. Evidently she's one of the brave ones who took on the responsibility. Or she's just mad. Well, perhaps being mad and brave are actually the same thing in this situation. Either way, it's not like she's been going out of her way to be friendly or encourage me to stay, so she shouldn’t really be too surprised that I'm not on board.
She gave Ivy a last stroke, assuming she wouldn't be able to pet her again if she was leaving straight away, and got out of bed. Her legs were no longer shaky or unsteady, now she was resolute about what she was going to do. She padded through the door as it automatically swished open, still in her pajamas, and saw that indeed, Rayna actually was doing some kind of odd martial arts moves in the middle of the living room, a VR unit covering her eyes.
"Kya! Hiya! Ha! Hahahaha!"
"Rayna?
" she said gently, so as not to startle her.
How can she be playing video games at a time like... Well, I guess to her this is just a normal day. How long as she been doing this? Soren didn't say, but from how entrenched in the whole thing they are, I'd have to guess she's known she's a mahou shoujo for quite a long time. Are there really some girls this happens to when they're as young as 12? It's horrifying...
Rayna stopped trying to dragon punch the air, or whatever it was she was doing, and pulled off her VR unit, blinking rapidly as her eyes adjusted to the normal world again.
"What were you doing?" Kitsuna asked, figuring maybe this would be easier if she broke the ice with some normal conversation about games systems or something.
"Ha! This? Soren made it for me, it's a simulator for fighting. It's supposed to be training. But, Soren doesn't really get that the transformation kinda means we don't have to train, so this is basically just for fun. I'm sure he'd give you a copy if you want to try, he seems to have taken a shine to you," she said with a wrinkling of the nose that girlishly said 'ewww, my brother is so gross'.
"Uh, yeah, sounds fun... Although, he might not be so willing when he finds out that all his explaining last night was kind of for nothing," she began.
"What do you mean? He said you'd at least got the gist of it. We can't hold your hand through everything, you know, we didn't have anyone as experienced as him to explain it all to us when I blacked out..."
"Oh, no, I mean, he was great... Well, not great, but yes, I did at least sort of understand. But I'm not going to stay. It's not for me. I have never had a fight in my life, and man, I'm not a brave person. I just came here to do my crappy marketing degree and get a job writing sales copy for some company that makes shoes or whatever. Nobody should be relying on me to protect them, and, look, you might not get it because you're stronger, but I just... I won't accept my life being taken out of my hands like that."