ONE WEEK AGO
It was supposed to be simple, she thought miserably.
Julia Alvarez examined her right hand, bloody sinew all that was left of its stolen fingers. Kyubey insisted they would grow back, but she wasn’t sure how much to believe him on that. He clearly hadn’t been forthright on anything else.
She hadn’t been doing this for very long, just a couple weeks. She had been so excited when the Incubator had approached her–she had heard of this creature, a being who would fulfill a wish and give her powers. That was one of the ways magical girls were made according to her friends at school.
So when Kyubey had offered her a contract, she had taken it without a second thought, clinging to escape from her dreadful life.
Her wish had been obvious: ever since the Catastrophe, her parents were fighting constantly. For over a year the muffled booming of traded insults and thin threats rattled her. She wanted them to stop being at each other’s throats, and then she’d be happy again too. She wished that her parents would love each other once more. She even said it just like that to give it that little twist of cutesy magical charm, and then Julia was Sugar Creek (her friends also said that magical girls all used the name of towns they lived in, a privilege she was thrilled to share).
It had worked, at least initially. Her parents were suddenly very involved with each other, seeming to forget about the world around them. She saw them in the living room and the kitchen and in the hallway, engaged in passionate discussion, openly ignoring her as she passed. That was all fine and good, Sugar Creek figured there would be some adjustments. Instead of bothering them she went out, exercising her new powers to their fullest extent.
She didn’t have a bad kit, either. Her wish was fairly generic, but Kyubey said her potential was “moderate regardless.” Her outfit kicked ass , a short rouge dress that felt oddly comfortable and easy to move in. Her divinely inspired weapon was a sword, unfortunately rather plain looking, but its iron weight felt right in her hands as she swung it to and fro.
The problem, then, was that she didn’t know how to use her powers. Didn’t even know what her power was to be honest. She had asked Kyubey for advice on the matter, but his answers hadn’t really made any sense. Something about it just didn’t click.
So she had asked for a mentor. Surely there were other magical girls in the area.
I advise against asking the local girls for help, the Incubator had said. When the magical girls in this city find you, they’ll ask you to join them and have you do all sorts of dangerous things, or they’ll make you leave. They’ve already sent many girls to other cities like St. Louis!
That was sufficiently terrifying to keep her from reaching out, not that she really knew how. She kept working at it on her own under Kyubey’s instruction, covertly practicing with her weapon and struggling to understand her magic.
After a week without much progress, Julia decided to try going out anyway. Between the effort of training and dismayed at the lack of progress, her soul gem was steadily darkening. In the dead of night when she was sure her parents were sleeping (she was sure they would have been too busy canoodling to notice anyway), she transformed and set out to prowl her neighborhood.
Sugar Creek abuts the northwestern portion of Independence, just south of the river. Though Independence was rife with plenty of game, Sugar Creek itself was affluent and had weathered the storm of the DuPage administration much better. It translated to slim pickings for her, and something craven inside hoped she would find nothing. After a couple hours of walking her neighborhood, feeling extremely visible and foolish in her frilly getup, she chanced upon her first wraith.
It dwelled within a children’s playground attached to an old brick and mortar church, separated from the sidewalk by a rusty chain link fence. No streetlights reached that far and Sugar Creek almost missed it in the dark, but once her eyes locked on it felt impossible she hadn’t seen it sooner.
It loomed unmoving in front of the bright yellow slide gouged with countless scratches, as if it had just gotten done taking a turn going down. Taller than any person she could think of, its body was man-like but its head contorted and shifted endlessly. She couldn’t make out a face no matter how closely she looked, sliding away in her vision like grease on teflon. It reminded her distinctly of when she dropped her laptop once and corrupted all of her photos, which struck her as strange.
The ghoul seemed to ignore her existence so she took a haltering step closer, somehow stumbling on thin air. The more she looked the harder it was to see anything definite. Swirling, shifting flecks of light resolved into nothing particular, except occasionally they looked something like… letters? This shiftless thing was not what she had been expecting at all. Why would a supernatural being look like this?
In the midst of her contemplation she suddenly realized that it was right in front of her, like it had been there all along. Her heart rocketed up to a million miles an hour, she jumped back and even gave a little shriek, but the wraith was unable to move over the fence. It bumped mindlessly against it in her direction, settled for stretching stinking hands out at her. Its rotten fish flesh fingers dripped pallid ichor.
She didn’t bother looking closely at it again, summoning her sword. Suddenly she felt horribly aware of her deficiencies, and her slashes fell awkwardly against the creature’s limbs. She retained none of her hard-earned grace, looking and feeling more like a child beating a tree with a shitty stick.
With some effort, an arm came off. The only effect was that the wraith instantly grew agitated. Now it did try climbing over the fence, a furious poltergeist seeking revenge. Adrenaline pumped through her heart and made her limbs tingle painfully. She was already hyperventilating, panic substituted for exhaustion.
Quickly! Kyubey cried at her from nowhere in particular. Wraiths are more susceptible to magic than regular weapons. If you use your powers you’ll defeat this one easily!
Fucking how, Kyubey? She hadn’t had any success doing magic in a whole week. There was no time to consider it now. She lashed out desperately at the thing’s head as it clambered angrily over the fence.
As it fell on the other side, suddenly she had the presence of mind to try stabbing . The tip of her blade penetrated the wraith’s nebulous glitch cloud, she felt a little twitch somewhere back in her brain. Something powerful twisted, though she couldn’t tell what it was exactly.
The wraith instantly, noiselessly poofed into dust. On the grass where it had fallen were three cubes the size of play dice.
Well done Miss Alvarez! Your first successful hunt, Kyubey cheered, appearing seemingly from nowhere to give a cute little hop under the streetlight.
There was a sense of elation in her chest, but it felt strangely muted and his praise rang hollow. It had been a lot scarier than she expected doing all this, and she wanted desperately to go home.
You should use those grief cubes, Kyubey explained. Hold them up to your soul gem, and your despair will be siphoned away.
Sugar Creek did as he suggested, and within a matter of seconds some of the cloudiness in her little opal cleared up. For a wonder, she did feel better. Not as much as she would have liked, though, and the first tinges of dawn were starting to creep in on the horizon. How had she been out all night already?
You may find that time passes strangely when near wraiths, especially a great number of them. Don’t worry Miss Alvarez, as you improve you’ll be able to hunt more efficiently. If you have enough grief cubes, they can even stave off hunger and the need to sleep!
That sounded kind of… awful, actually? Maybe she’d get used to it. Whatever the Incubator said, she had to stifle a yawn as she trudged back to her house up the hill.
She slept through school and had another outing that night. Her parents didn’t notice her slipping away, but this time she didn’t find any wraiths. Endless wandering up and down the suburban neighborhood turned up nothing but figurative ghosts.
The place you live is quiet and contended, Kyubey explained. You may need to look further out to find anything. The nearby area of Indian Mound might prove a more fruitful hunting ground.
What? That’s five miles away! How did Kyubey expect her to get there at this time of night?
You should be able to make that distance with less effort now. Your contract has given you increased strength and speed, it’s a simple matter of tapping into that.
No no, not this shit again. His explanations were bad and made no sense. He hadn’t mentioned anything about this before! Fuck this, it was already 4 AM anyway. She would try some other time.
But she didn’t hunt the next night, trying desperately to catch up on her real life responsibilities (mostly mountains of homework the teachers had thrown at her). Feeling her spirits sink, she snuck frequent glances at her soul gem. Cloudier, slowly growing darker by the hour. The cat hadn’t really explained what would happen if this kept up, but she didn’t care to find out.
Sugar Creek put it out of her mind for now, opting instead to suffer through algebra and geography. Slightly delirious and definitely irritated, she decided she would follow Kyubey’s advice that evening. With the last of the daylight leaking out of a twilit sky, she put on a non-descript hoodie and took off on foot over highway 24 to the west.
Regret filled her within minutes. There was thankfully a footpath for some of the journey, but it left little clearance between the busy road on her right and the sprawling tangle of trees on her left. There was a lot of construction that obscured her path, and at times she’d have to step onto the street to bypass a hulking machine that had been dumped in place, waiting to be picked up in the morning by its master. She couldn’t stop herself from wincing every time a car flew by, flash blinding her and roaring in her ears.
Westward she trekked, passing the License Office and closed restaurants and a couple Dollar Generals with crusty geriatrics shopping for sport. There were a lot of boarded windows and doors, far more than she was used to seeing. She dragged her feet a little faster past these, her mother’s shrill warning of strangers playing in her head.
Her family never went to this part of the suburb, it had started festering before she was even born. By the same token, it meant she didn’t have to walk quite so long before stumbling on potential prey. She felt more than saw a dimming in the air, an oil slick draping over the world. Light didn’t reach as far as it should, choked by a sinful force that made the scraping of her shoes echo uncomfortably.
Near one of these closed shops, a crumbling facade that claimed proudly to be “The Best Place In Town” to get empanadas, Sugar Creek felt the hair on the back of her neck stand straight on end. It was an unusual sensation for her, just as alien as the three ghouls which stared right at her from between slats of moldering particle board.
It took her another two blocks before she realized they were stalking her, shambling specters reaching out for her like lovers keening for a fierce embrace. She transformed, caught in a red flash of light that threw up weak shadows around her. Her sword was in her hands the same instant, but when she held it up she found she was shaking so hard she could barely keep it pointed straight.
They were closing the distance quickly, too. There wasn’t room for all three on the sidewalk, so one of the wraiths shuffled onto the highway to keep pace with its fellows. A car ran it over almost immediately, exploding it into an amorphous cloud of dust.
Sugar Creek felt the thrill of a laugh at the thing’s misfortune, but instead of dissipating the cloud coalesced, a mist collapsing into its original shape quicker than it took her to blink. Kyubey hadn’t mentioned anything about this to her either. The gears in her brain turned, and for the first time she wondered just how much he was holding back from her.
Fuck this. She opted to flee, to find something less menacing, less challenging. Without thinking about it she banished her sword and turned on her heels, only to be facing a fourth wraith just behind her.
Sugar Creek couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe as the thing gripped her hands and pulled . She was stuck in a vice, her strength drained out of her as it tugged at her wrists and she felt muscle fibers stretching in her arms and chest, her little body breaking. She screamed harder than she had ever screamed before, an ugly sound that ripped her throat open and filled it with desperate saliva. Another car screamed by unseeing, uncaring.
Her lungs emptied as the other three wraiths caught up and started to bite her somehow, flailing at her tortured flesh. The pain wasn’t as bad as she thought it should be, but she was so frightened she couldn’t think straight. Most of all she needed to get away , a simple enough goal for her to cling to.
With a desperate burst of concentration, she felt that thing that had been there on the first night. A little nodule in her brain, something that hadn’t been there before contracting. She tugged at it, a tiny pinch that turned into a death grip.
The wraith holding her exploded into greasy flames and shrieked, dropping her. After a single second of conflagration, it poofed and did not form again.
Openly gaping, she just had time to remember the wraiths behind her before they seized her by her clothes, a clump of her hair and her left hand. She didn’t want to do this shit again, pulled her body away with an animal’s desperation. There was a sharp flair of pain in her scalp and hand that lanced through her brain, but she had ripped free she could get away . With haggard breaths she jumped so hard that for a few seconds she left the ground entirely, putting distance between her and the wraiths.
She landed on the other side of them, on the way towards home, and sprinted as hard as she could.
Twenty minutes later found Sugar Creek approaching her front door, not quite limping on the shoulder of the road, but close enough. Five minutes after leaving the wraiths out of sight she had finally slowed down, nursing a stitch in her sides. It took her another five minutes to realize that the wraiths had taken a couple fingers off her, the index and the middle, and she had immediately hid the stumps in the folds of her rouge dress before she had a chance to see her torn sinews wriggling. She hadn’t even gotten the fucking grief cubes from the one she did kill.
She felt blood draining, seeping into the folds of the outfit. She failed to notice the living room lights were on, and she walked in on her parents sitting prim in the living room, waiting for her.
They demanded to know where she had been for the last two hours. Two? She couldn’t have been gone for more than one, but the clock on the wall said otherwise. Why was she sleeping in class? Her teachers had bothered them today about it. What was she wearing? What’s that on her dress? Was that blood dripping on the floor?
More than the confrontation itself, there was something in their tone that didn’t feel right. They were usually pretty attentive, but this felt… accusatory. All anger, no concern.
Sugar Creek considered for a little bit in silence, unsure how to explain. They demanded an explanation, and her heart started to hurt.
Shit. It wasn’t a secret anymore really, was it? The world knew about this already. She opted just to tell them outright: mom, dad, she had become a magical girl.
Their eyes widened with comprehension, and impossibly to her, disgust . She was what? What did she say?? How could she do this? Didn’t she know what magical girls had done to this fucking country last year, what the President was trying to protect them from? Her father especially was getting louder and louder, bits of spittle flying from his mouth. Everything was different now, it was wrong, and now she’s part of the fucking problem too. His face was turning purple, and for every shade it grew darker the more scared she became. First she ruined their marriage, now this? How could she turn out to be one of those freaks?
Wait. What? She had done what? She stuttered, unable to tell if she had heard that last part correctly.
Her father also seemed bothered he had said it… but not too bothered. Yeah, you heard him. Their marriage had been falling apart ever since they had her. They bent over backwards to take care of her. They had been on the verge of divorce, actually.
A week ago they had broken down and started to discuss things, tried to figure out where they stood. When they realized why exactly they had gotten so distant, that was all it took for them to fall in love again.
Instantly the tightness and fear in her stomach disappeared, ice taking their place. Wordlessly, Sugar Creek turned and walked out, heedless of their shouts. Lights flicked on in neighboring houses as her father screamed at her to come back this instant, but she paid him no mind. She was numb, her senses refusing to report. She forgot her missing fingers and blood trailed on the sidewalk.
Fifteen minutes later she was back on highway 24, her sword already out as she stalked down the tattered walkway and in the street. When she passed by the best empanadas in town, though, the three wraiths were nowhere to be seen.
So she kept walking.
Things blurred around her. She wasn’t reading signs or the names of stores anymore, and when she bothered to look they were inchoate anyway, broken shapes emulsifying with the black night sky.
She couldn’t stop hearing those words flying out of her dad’s mouth. Ruined our marriage. They bounced around in her head, jumbled up her brain and turned it into steaming goo. Ruined our marriage. She came to the underpass of North 435. Ruined our marriage. Crossed the bridge over Blue River. Ruined our marriage.
Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. There were no shops anymore, no corner gas stations, no 24 hour fast food or boarded up buildings. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. The world slid around and away from her. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. She was in a gray haze, alone. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. She drifted through it, trudging as blood dripped from her missing fingers onto the shoddy pavement beneath. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage. Ruined our marriage.
The world took little note of her passing besides.
After a few days she felt the ice in her chest thaw a little bit. Looking to see when and where she was, her phone (she awkwardly tapped at it with her left fingers, unable to hold it steadily in her right hand anymore) told her that it was merely 1 in the morning, a scant few hours after her departure. The nearest road sign told her she was on the Paseo, just east of 71. A dangerous part of town, especially at night, for just about anybody.
Kyubey hadn’t told her about miasmas yet, but she didn’t need the explanation to know the simmering fog wrapping around her was unnatural and wrong. It boiled with malevolence, spewing a promise of distortion.
This was the second to last place on Earth she wanted to be right now. Despite the pain that intensified in her hand, she hoofed it away from the wraith fog towards the highway.
Maybe she could get in contact with the other girls here? Kyubey hadn’t exactly been forthcoming, maybe they weren’t so bad as he made them out to be.
But where the hell should Sugar Creek look for them? She doubted that the cat was going to tell if she asked. She was utterly without tools or knowledge. The gravity of the situation quickly sank in.
The highway sprawled in front of her then, with a couple of bums sleeping in the shadow of the upper recesses of the underpass. Looking at them, she suddenly felt very tired too, an ache that surpassed pain and crept into her bones, liquifying her muscles. Hoping she wasn’t bothering them, she sat down on the hard concrete nearby and pulled her phone out. She got a little blood on it, but at this point who could care.
Doubtful that she could get any rest, she decided to take advantage of the stable mobile data she got here in the city and trawled through the internet. Social media held little allure for her, with the only people she knew frequently unable to access it regularly, so she opted to check the news.
There were a myriad of articles on any and all developments related to magical girls–the hot ticket news item that never went away now. Against her better judgment, periodically she also expanded the comments to see what thoughts they had to offer.
Most of it was horribly vacuous. Poorly spelled, intellectually bankrupt garbage that offered no insights whatsoever–aside from indicating the miscreant who posted it was fit only for removal from the human species. Occasionally there was something that scraped at her like flint off steel, producing a spark, a mote of capacity for thought. Mostly though, as she scrolled through endless layers of dreck she felt her mood dampen and rot in real time.
Magic is real? Give me a break!! When will they tell us the *actual truth?*
They all need to be aressted for hiding for so long! Wtf is the presdent doing??
the magic (read: SATANIC) administration continues to menace true-believers
wow it is dangerous to be around magic users? who would of thought”
The government has been using these poor girls all along and chose not to tell us. People wouldn’t be afraid for their lives if magical girls simply came forward and added themselves to a public registry, it’s very simple.
Miss Alvarez.
And on and on. The clock in the corner of the screen ticked on, incrementing steadily from midnight to 3 AM.
Miss Alvarez, I must advise against continuing this recreational activity, it appears to be distressing you to an extreme level.
Unbidden, thoughts of cruelty entered her mind. Every comment she saw drained her just a little bit more, spawned a fleeting mental image of her finding the person who posted it, whipping a gun out, and shooting them right in the head. She heard the bang in her mind as clearly as if she was actually doing it.
magical girls can just wish for money, they have unlimited funds to tell lies that everything we’re suffering through isn’t because of them. Bang.
MAGICAL GIRLS ARE A PLAGUE ON THE EARTH THEY MUST BE HUNTED DOWN AND DESTROYED BY THE COMMAND OF GOD Bang.
I would rather die than be forced to go against what I’ve believed my entire life. Bang.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. BANG. BANG. BANG. BANG.
The only time she looked away from the screen was a flicker of her sunken eyes towards her soul gem. She put the swirl of its encroaching darkness out of her mind, did not allow herself to register its torpid light dwindling… quickly.
You are approaching the point of no return.
BANG. Each one so insignificant on its own, together it drowned her like the whole of the ocean.
BANG. Her eyes were bugging out of her head, she was a maddened horse frothing at the bit.
BANG. She wanted to drag her nails across her arms, to flay the skin of her body so that it hung from her like ribbons.
Very well. I regret to inform you that our business is concluded.
BANG. Her head twitched frantically back and forth, the muscles in her neck bulging. A thin veil of red draped itself over everything, baptizing the world in her wrath.
BANG. Her impotent rage came out of her eyes, hot and salty to cleanse her face.
How could so many people she had never met hate her so much?
How could her parents do this to her?
Clack . Her phone clattered awkwardly onto the pockmarked concrete. Screen still on, it accumulated a few more scratches and dents, flecking a couple drops of blood away.
After a few minutes, one of the bums nearby took notice of the glaring light and shuffled by. Stooping to examine the device, he looked around. Seemed decent enough to him, in his amaretto haze. Before touching he cast a glance around, trying to see if there was an obvious owner just waiting to fuck with him. There was some weirdo here just a second ago.
He did not notice the figure flying overhead, would not have understood the fleeting form of a magical girl who up until a few minutes ago had felt the presence of another like her, somewhere around here. The bum could not perceive a girl named Kaycee conducting a now fruitless search.
Eventually, satisfied with his caution, he pocketed the phone and went back to his tattered blankets.
Chapter End Notes
"But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up."
I lived in Independence, not Sugar Creek, but that playground equipment at the church is something I saw very often when my sibling was taking guitar lessons in the area. I think they ripped it up a few years ago and replaced it with something new and shiny.
The chapter originally ended with Sugar Creek in her room doom scrolling on a desktop computer or a laptop instead. I figured it would be more effective for her to be a freshly turned out teen though.
This is the second and last time I specifically mention Troost, in the first chapter I called it up alongside the Paseo and South Blue Valley. South Blue Valley is a neighborhood that I've passed through twice and have no interest in visiting again. Troost and the Paseo are both long roads passing straight through the city. Most of their lengths are fine to travel on, at least during the day, but there's a few blocks on each that you avoid at all costs if it's after dark.
They are in fact not the best empanadas in town, but I think the business is still in operation. I prefer tacos from a local place I eat at every weekend anyway.